Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

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We use SPAs and a pretty strict typescript/react stack. And I still have to know:

Cloud Tech (AWS) which also includes, lambdas, Iam management, dynamoDB, cdk or serverless, API gateway, S3, secret managers etc.

Add to that list the technologies that often get thrown in for extra monitoring testing etc. Jest or mocha/Chai for unit tests. Dynatrace for monitoring. Kibana or something for logs. Some tool for analytics. Github actions for setting up deployment and CI. Maybe you need redis for intermediate caching, etc.

In addition, before you kind of sort of had an intuition of how the data flowed through your basic stack from the database to the web page. Nowadays who the heck knows what's happening. You'll hit some api gateway endpoint which auths through a random lambda who knows where on what server, then it will go hit the actual lambda that holds the function you want to call which may reach out to a database but get intercepted by the redis cache etc etc etc.

Yes modern web dev is definitely much simpler /s.

I see this “AWS for everything” Well-Architected stuff everywhere. AWS benefits greatly from inserting itself in between all our architectural layers.

There’s nothing stopping companies from using the cloud for its primitives (compute and storage), maybe with managed FOSS services (RDS Postgres). We don’t _need_ to go all in on AWS to build a ‘modern’ web application. Yet somehow much of the industry dances to AWS’ tune on how to architect software.

And good luck with having a development environment or even decent end to end/integration testing once you start using all those services.

Architects in my company are required to have aws certificates. They can be monkeys but if they can list a dozen of AWS products and put everything there they are given the keys of everything.

You may work at a company that requires fullstack expertise, but there are plenty of other companies where frontend developers are fully insulated from all those cloud technologies. I'm not sure what your point is here tbh.

A friend of mine moved to a company where they use plain Laravel (with just some sprinkles of js using Alpine) and they deploy to heroku. A team of 10 devs, no systems/devops/Infra and he’s fascinated how well things go and how fast they ship stuff compared to where we worked together before (with all the usual react/redux stuff and an elixir backend on kubernetes)

I wouldn’t say modern web dev is simpler, I just think it is more decoupled. This helps with training for & staffing the more specialized roles that emerged.

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