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Ask HN: Is cloud computing decimating platform/infrastructure engineering jobs?

8 points by curiousgeek ↗ HN
Cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are providing more and more tools that allow companies to build applications with far fewer engineers to handle the backend.

Does this imply a gloomy long term outlook for engineers in other companies who do platform and infrastructure development? Are there any leading indicators of this trend?

3 comments

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NetStrikeForce
I believe it's empowering more people to build applications without in-house infrastructure support.

Once the applications grow big, the need for infrastructure people comes back. The difference is now these people are not touching hardware but software.

curiousgeek
The cloud providers are providing a lot of software as well: relational databases, other kinds of data stores, load balancers and so on. They also provide you an integrated ecosystem where these things work well together.

Correspondingly, you need far fewer engineers in your company to build and maintain custom software for such things. I am wondering whether in medium term - say the next 4 to 5 years - we are going to see an order of magnitude decrease in the number of jobs in this sector.

NetStrikeForce
Most of those pieces of software can be configured as well (load balancing methods, DB parameters, etc).

I don't think we need less people, I think we need people to work differently. Also, an application needing of X amount of infrastructure persons will now need less than that, which frees resources to deploy more applications.

In a nutshell, I don't think we're going to lose jobs at all. I think the cloud is a fundamental pillar of the startup system, which is creating so many jobs that didn't exist before. Efficiency doesn't drive us to less jobs - it drives us to more jobs.