On Baking Bread and Multi-Cloud
Or how surface substitutions can lead to false promise.
Yesterday I made bread for the first time. It was soda bread. To a recipie. Not necessarily an achievement worth broadcasting, but a milestone nonetheless. What’s worth discussing, however, is the result.
You see, it was incredibly dense; more a savoury muffin than a seeded loaf. Not worth beating myself up about. But it intrigued me enough to try and work out why.
I’m a fairly seasoned cook (if an inexperienced baker). So when the recipe called for light rye flour (it was Huge Fearnley-Whittingstall, so ludicrous demands can be expected), and the shop only sold wholemeal I didn’t think twice about substituting.
But it turns out that when it comes to the chemistry of raising bread, the flour matters. Any change needs to be subtly accounted for in the rest of the proptions.
So what does that have to do with code? After all, it’s Tom In Code, not Tom In Bread (luckily, all things considered). Well- it’s a quiet reminder about how a little ignorance can go a long way.
And a reflection on the difference between how non-technical people often see the many offerings of cloud providers, and the truth soon realised by those who thing they can happily substitute Azure brand X for AWS’ own X.
The lesson: Like bread flour- one cloud provider’s offerings cannot be swapped with another without changing the recipe/architecture.
