165: The Cloud Pod Angry That Amazon Describes Step Functions as Low Code

The Cloud Pod

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses wholesome local Oakland toast for breakfast. Plus: Hybrid infrastructure is unsustainable, the AWS Proton template library expands, and Amazon angers the team by describing Step Functions as “low-code.”

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• Against the trend of popular opinion, it turns out that hybrid infrastructure is a bad idea in the long term, with a few significant drawbacks.
• The AWS Proton template library just got bigger, so now people can find something else to complain about.
• Amazon annoyingly describes Step Functions as low-code, which is definitely not true.

Top Quotes

• “Proton was only developed as an answer for, how should we deploy onto Amazon? It’s setting yourself up just so someone can armchair-quarterback and poke holes in it. Now they’re saying, well, how would you do this? [Answer:] You have the templates. And then they’re gonna be like, the templates are cool, except it doesn’t meet my pretty edge case, so they’ll complain about that. We’ll see templates for the templates next.”
• “I just love the assumption that you could low-code a solution with Step Functions, just because I’ve created many a step function and state machine flow. And all it is is coding and then figuring out why the code isn’t doing what I want — because I’m not passing things correctly between the different functions. The ability for someone who can’t write code to be able to to accomplish anything is a little far fetched.”

General News: Don’t Plan on Hybrid for Long…

• In the cloud court of public opinion, dissent is infrequent. Yet here’s Michael Bathon of Rimini Street claiming that hybrid is actually bad in the long-term.

AWS: What Is Low-Code, Anyway?

• The AWS Proton template library expands — as does people’s list of things to complain about.
• Amazon very irritatingly calls Step Functions low-code, with new workflow observability features.
• Can the annoying customer with the single use case please stand up? Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports a lot more read replicas. Driven by the business side, perhaps?

GCP: Something’s Got To Give With BigQuery

• Cloud TPU VMs are now generally available, with faster speeds and lower costs for training.
• BigQuery BI Engine now supports more tools and custom applications. All we heard is that the analysts want to learn BigQuery, so they made it work for them.
• It’s one thing to provide a good service and another thing to develop an open source tool that