Crimes against cloud: an investigation
Also, a newsletter rebrand!
Housekeeping note - as old friends will observe, I’ve rebranded this newsletter from “Cloud Irregular” to “Good Tech Things”.
Two reasons why:
Flexibility: I’d like to explore tech topics beyond just cloud! But don’t worry, the “Cloud Irregular” essays will continue.
Consolidation: I’ve created a brand-new website called Good Tech Things that finally has all my cartoons, infographics, flowcharts, and tech songs easily searchable, scrollable, and shareable in one place. I am back to regularly creating new cartoons, and I hope you’ll bookmark goodtechthings.com for lots of nonsense about cloud, DevOps, AI, etc.
That’s it! On to today’s Good Tech Thing.
A unified theory of horrifying cloud experiments
On Twitter the other day I asked people to tell me about the most aesthetically horrifying things they’ve built in the cloud. Things that technically fall within the provider’s terms of service, but that no sensible person would ever dream of doing.
Specifically, I wanted to know about crimes people perpetrated against the cloud because they WANTED to, not because they HAD to. We all know the true cloud transgressions are mandated by business constraints and documented on SharePoint with words like “Progress OpenEdge-to-EKS integration” and “The production infrastructure is an IDE running in debug mode”. These stories make everyone sad. I want fun stories.
I was also not looking for projects that are zany, but use the cloud in a fundamentally straightforward way. Plenty of educational projects out there like Lars Klint’s Llama Cam fall into that category.
Instead I was looking for things like … well, here’s Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch:
Yep, that’s a serverless function tortured into emulating multiplayer Pokemon on a Gameboy. The immediate question arises: why would someone do this? A Gameboy emulator is fun on its own, so why make things harder on yourself with such a weird infrastructure choice? Nobody who visits the web app will know or care how you hosted it. What’s the point?
Anyway, surely there isn’t a whole hobbyist industry of people smuggling state into AWS Lambda … oh, sorry, what was that?
Aha. We have our first working origin theory of ridiculous cloud experiments: People love to torture cloud services in order to squeeze more out of the free tier.
This practice is apparently not limited to serverless functions:
(That sound you hear is the squeak of every Microsoft IT Pro’s sphincter clenching at once.)
But parsimoniousness isn’t the whole story! It isn’t even always part of the story! At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have people committing cloud crimes that are nonsensically MORE expensive than they have to be.
The canonical example of this is surely Dyna53. Yes, that is a key-value datastore using AWS DynamoDB semantics … built on top of DNS TXT records. This project is explicitly identified as a joke. But it’s a joke backed, I think, by love for the world’s original highly-available distributed data store. Dyna53 has a message, and the message is “We appreciate you, DNS!”
Similarly, here’s a chat server and a RISC-V emulator somehow implemented on top of a container registry. The point of doing this is maybe a LITTLE bit to show off - but mostly to celebrate the flexibility of the OCI spec.
Or, most horrifying of all, there’s this, a putative love letter to the power of AWS CloudFormation custom resources:
If you are going to deploy that, I would highly suggest enabling drift detection.
All of which leads to theory 2: People abuse the cloud to show their love for the cloud. That probably looks toxic when you write it down, but it’s fine. We’re all fine. Everyone’s normal and well-adjusted here.
Maybe everyone except Aidan Steele.
No, Aidan.
Why, Aidan?
I have never met Aidan Steele. I don’t know anything about him except that he periodically shows up to cloud Twitter with … an upside-down-ternet, or auth rickrolls, or whatever this is. His shtick goes beyond “I will bend the cloud into a pretzel to prove how clever I am.” He has passed into the realm of performance art, or maybe Zen. Asking why is like listening for the sound of one hand clapping. I hope he never stops.
But Aidan’s chaos points us toward a fundamental motive for cloud crimes, a unifying theory that ties together stock-trades-as-YAML and serverless-golf and Turing-complete container registries and all the rest. Ultimately, we build these things not because they are easy, or because they are sensible, but because they are funny.
You probably can’t understand software engineers until you understand this.
Look, the cloud is enormous and overwhelming and filled with one million services that are billed across one billion incomprehensible dimensions. And I think that inspires in us, as developers, sort of a Kafkaesque spirit. (Franz or Apache, what’s the difference?)
It’s funny to take a very serious enterprise software service and wear it on your head like a hat. It’s funny to imagine some poor PM with a usage-based KPI watching their numbers go up and whispering to themselves: “Not like that.”
It’s funny that we were always warned about vendor lock-in. Hey vendors, it’s time you learned: You’re all locked in here with us.
Yay for the cartoons return! I do like the mental image of the cloud being a surreal artwork and we're all trapped in there with it. Probably with Lensa-created AI versions of ourselves, just because. I do question the content of this particular edition being considered a "Good" Tech Thing, however. ;)