wade womersley – york based software engineer
Fancy cloud abstractions often look like they remove complexity, but a lot of the time they just move it somewhere harder to see. That matters when something breaks and you need to debug it or hand it over to someone else.
Clever infrastructure looks impressive in diagrams. Boring infrastructure is usually easier to operate, easier to debug, and much easier to keep alive once real users depend on it.
AWS diagrams love to look simple. The problem is that the operational reality behind them is usually doing a lot more work than the picture admits.
Serverless has real tradeoffs, but for small teams I still think it usually wins. The operational overhead stays low, the first version ships faster, and the mistakes are easier to afford early on.
I still like serverless, but the tradeoff is obvious when something breaks at 2 a.m. The architecture is easy to ship and harder to reason about when you need logs, context, and a fast path to the real failure.