Code-wise, cloud-foolish avoiding bad technology choices - Forrest Brazeal

This resource first appeared in issue #15 on 20 Mar 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Cloud, Technical Leadership: Systems: Other

Code-wise, cloud-foolish: avoiding bad technology choices - Forrest Brazeal

This article is from the start of the year, but it’s been circulating around, and it is good advice in a short article.

Everywhere in computing, but it maybe worse in research computing, is a tendency towards NIH Syndrome - “Not Invented Here”. There’s a tendency to roll our own rather than lean on existing tooling; which is frankly madness, since our specialty is using and computing technology to solve research problems, not to invent computing technology. We should be repurposing things left and right to push science forward.

One particular manifestation of this is to use commercial cloud offerings and forsake using the managed services of the cloud, “because it’s vendor lock in”, or “because it’s expensive”. I mean, maybe you can run Postgres or Lustre on AWS cheaper than AWS/Azure/Google can, as long as your own time has no value, but probably not, right?