Episode Details

Links:

• Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. I’m Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.

Pete: Fridays From the Field, Jesse. We're back again.

Jesse: Back, back, back again.

Pete: I always say that when I rage quit computers, it would be fun to be a farmer. And so maybe this is a little trial run “Fridays From the Field.” I'm just out in the field.

Jesse: So basically, what I'm hearing is that you are the old man out in the field, yelling at the clouds as they go by.

Pete: Well, now that I work from home pretty much all the time as part of Duckbill, but also due to COVID. I do yell at the squirrels who constantly tear up my yard. I've now turned into that person.

Jesse: [laugh]. Oh, oh, Pete, I'm so sorry.

Pete: Those squirrels. I hate them. So we're back again, talking about the Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Savings. And this time, we're talking about ‘infrastructure code smell.’

Jesse: Ooh, fun one.

Pete: I like to equate this to, who brought the fish for lunch and microwave to that?

Jesse: I always understood that at a deep core level, but didn't really think about it until I actually did microwave fish one day, and I regret everything.

Pete: Don't do it. I'm telling you, folks, don't do it. You can bring tuna fish in. I guess that's fine. That's a little bit better. If it's packed in oil, it actually is a lot less smelly. Should we do a food podcast? No, I’m just kidding. [laugh].

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: So ‘code smell,’ I do want to bring this one up because I actually did a little bit of a TIL—today I learned—with code smell. Yeah, this term was actually coined by someone that was a writer about the agile software movement, Kent Beck. He was working with Martin Fowler, who's a noted author about programming. In the book called Refactoring, they coined this phrase ‘code smell.’

Jesse: I did not know this.

Pete: Yeah. You know, you kind of hear a term, you just accept it without really understanding why. But what it was called in this book was, code smell is a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem in the system. So obviously, it is what it sounds like: something smells. Something doesn't seem good here. And obviously, it can take a lot of forms. You most often hear it in, obviously, software engineering but, guess what? Software engineering has expanded to manage our infrastructure, right?

Jesse: Mm-hm, absolutely. Yeah, it's not just about—or I should say, infrastructure smell is not just about wasted resources. It's really thinking about all of those one-off hacks that got you this far. So, that one time that you couldn't deploy something into production, so you just said, “You know what? I'm just going to log into the console and spin up that instance, and then call it a day, a