Infrastructure from code is the least exciting development in the evolution of ops I've seen.
Helping manage complexity -- great. Pulumi, Terraform, the CDK, all of these infrastructure as code tools help manage complexity.
Hiding complexity behind a DSL, via comments attached to methods intermingled with code or annotations -- not great.
Some of these implementations are my business logic -> your DSL via annotations or comments -> <Some other IaC DSL> -> CloudFormation -> AWS. At some point the returns are diminished as you add more layers vs. the cost of operating what's generated and trying to debug issues.
> The devops answer to complexity is always more complexity.
I don't think this is a valid take. The main responsibility of DevOps is automation. You cannot automate without writing code, which by definition means introducing complexity. You either introduce complexity by writing low-level scripts, or by adopting a tool/framework which allows you to write high-level code by hiding the low-level code in their entrails.
I feel your comment implies that DevOps mindlessly adds complexity, when the truth of the matter is that it greatly simplifies everything at the expense of surfacing all the complexity that forced the world to treat all the cattle as fragile little pets.
I have no idea what point you were trying to make. The "cattle" analogy is about reproducibility. There is absolutely no reason to keep systems in an unmanageable state that you cannot reproduce.
"Infrastructure from code is the least exciting development in the evolution of ops I've seen"
The best things in programming are the things that are the least exciting. Stability and simplicity are huge selling points unless all you want is the new shiny.
That's completely missing the point of the GP, which is that they're not excited because they don't see the value, not that Infrastructure from Code is stable and simple.
Helping manage complexity -- great. Pulumi, Terraform, the CDK, all of these infrastructure as code tools help manage complexity.
Hiding complexity behind a DSL, via comments attached to methods intermingled with code or annotations -- not great.
Some of these implementations are my business logic -> your DSL via annotations or comments -> <Some other IaC DSL> -> CloudFormation -> AWS. At some point the returns are diminished as you add more layers vs. the cost of operating what's generated and trying to debug issues.