Back to the Basics in Cloud Product Development

If your basic functionality doesn’t work, the whiz-bang features don’t matter

I’ve been thinking about this recently and just a quick note on a topic that’s been on my mind.

As cloud platforms attempt to deploy and develop more and more new and exciting features, some of the top people in your company want to move over to what is “new and shiny.”

In the process the solid engineering that goes into the base platform may start to degrade over time.

Some developers may find these things boring:

• Fixing bugs that occur as new features get added to the system
• Validating that core engineering principles are in place for all new products and features
• Implementing base features required for every new service like proper CloudFormation templates (I’m looking at you Lambda Step Functions)
• Repetitive QA to make sure that things are still working correctly
• Fixing old issues like policy documents in CloudFormation that give you a generic error message for every possible syntax issue
• Ensuring your deployment system on your cloud platform works flawlessly — and fast

The above may be boring but if your customers can’t do the basic things they won’t be able to do the fancy new things you are introducing to the platform.