Forrest is an enterprise cloud architect, speaker, and community advocate. Currently a senior manager at A Cloud Guru, he spent years designing applications for the cloud at Infor and Trek10. One of the original AWS Serverless Heroes, Forrest was also named one of Jefferson Frank's Top 7 Global AWS Experts in 2019. His first book, "The Read-Aloud Cloud", is coming from Wiley in 2020.

Code-wise, cloud-foolish

As technical decision-makers, our intuition often tells us that the “cheapest” solution to solve a problem (ie, the one with the best cost/benefit tradeoff) is one that:

• Uses technologies we are already comfortable with
• Gives us a sense of control by using open-source or vendor-agnostic software
• Incorporates custom code and tooling where existing off-the-shelf options are pricey or otherwise unappealing

In this talk, we'll examine using real-world examples why each of these heuristics can lead us astray due to familiarity bias, faulty pattern-matching, or just plain old hubris.

We'll discuss declarative versus imperative infrastructure-as-code tools, "back door lock-in", and the dangers of the world's least boring technology: the code you just wrote.

You'll leave this talk with a clear sense not just of when to build versus buy, but of how to minimize overall regret in your technology choices. (And possibly with a healthy skepticism of Kubernetes.)