The biggest modern IT myth is the maintenance cost of bare metal. People are talking about servers made from metal by engineers as if they’re some mythical devices made by ancient wizards. I can imagine some software magic in closed source applications like Oracle databases, but most of the software we use for servers is open source—you can literally read the code.

Magical thinking is a problem of competence. When you don’t understand something, it feels magical. When you don’t want to understand something, you will never trust the bare metal server.

Yes, indeed modern methods of software deployment put some relief to developers, but mostly because of the complexity created by developers. The more advanced AWS becomes, the more complex tools and architecture developers will choose. Developers are driven by complexity and without understanding of the basic law: entropy can’t be reversed, they will put all of their free time available because of the hundreds of thousands of AWS engineers to create new challenges for them. The more stupidity an instrument tolerates, the more stupid the average instrument user will be. Short-term gains from simplicity of sophisticated technology providers will soon be covered by advanced distributed map-reduce based architecture for your skate shop.

Without physical limitations, people lose the sense of reality. There are no magical clouds. There are physical servers managed by engineers. And when you put software to the cloud, the only thing you do is outsource part of the job to Amazon, Microsoft, or other company engineers. I understand many people who are not willing to ever talk to DevOps and are ready to pay any money for that, but entropy will fill the gap soon and you will have the same amount of DevOps engineers as with bare metal servers, because of striving for complexity without physical limitations.

“It’s more fun to be competent” — DHH