Thread by @QuinnyPig

The four tiers of @awscloud infrastructure management are:
1. Using the console
2. Using CloudFormation or Terraform
3. Using the CDK (to which I'm starting to warm)
4. Using the console and lying about it.

Let's talk about the fourth stage: ClickOps.

I want to be excruciatingly clear here: this is for once not a shitpost. I have a longer form article available: lastweekinaws.com/blog/clickops/

To say "I got some feedback in my email inbox" is understating it significantly. It generally distills down to two schools of thought:

a) "Oh my god I thought it was just me, this suddenly makes sense."
b) Gatekeeping jackassery.

I write for group A.

Call it low/no code, call it paint by numbers, whatever; it's how I first engage with new AWS services myself.

Please, feel free to tell me that I don't understand how cloud services work.

I posit it's the only way to get the true *intent* of a service.

"Begin as you mean to go on." The console expression of a service is the voice of the service team to the customer. "This is how we think about what we've built and how we think you're going to use it."

Sometimes they're wrong, often they're right, but it's always instructive.

"We're purely infrastructure as code" sneer many people.

Really? Including CI/CD? Even the Jenkins box?

All of your S3 buckets?

Any chance you're in a betting mood?

Your DevOps branded tool of choice and the console alike are making the same API calls. It's a matter of implementation. If one of those upsets another's sense of order, then it's an implementation problem.

Customers don't need to get involved in Mommy and Daddy's fight.

Years ago my brother was an extended houseguest. He took it upon himself to train my bullshit chihuahua, and not in English.

"She understands," he said. "She speaks God's language."

The "dog" still goes outside when told to in Hebrew, not YAML. Get over yourselves!

AWS claims to be all about large enterprise adoption. They've planted a flag of teaching 29 million people cloud skills by 2025.

I dunno; I am but a humble Cloud Economist but it seems to me that teaching them a GUI is going to be an easier sell than the alternatives.

Because the reality is that other providers are rushing to meet customers where they are. We've seen the pattern with AWS itself: if you wait long enough and avoid a painful problem, it gets easier and better.

I don't want to see third parties eat your lunch.

Computing gets better the more accessible it becomes.

ClickOps and Developer Experience converge in the same way that QA and Monitoring once did.

There's a bright future here, if we're bold enough to find it.