Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?
You've discovered what many other people have: The cloud is the new time-share mainframe.<p>Programming in the 1960s to 80s was like this too. You'd develop some program in isolation, unable to properly run it. You "submit" it to the system, and it would be scheduled to run along with other workloads. You'd get a printout of the results back hours later, or even tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.<p>This work loop is incredibly inefficient, and was replaced by development that happened entirely locally on a workstation. This dramatically tightened the edit-compile-debug loop, down to seconds or at most minutes. Productivity skyrocketed, and most enterprises shifted the majority of their workload away from mainframes.<p>Now, in the 2020s, mainframes are back! They're just called "the cloud" now, but not much of their essential nature has changed other than the vendor name.<p>The cloud, just like mainframes:<p>- Does not provide all-local workstations. The only full-fidelity platform is the shared server.<p>- Is closed source. Only Amazon provides AWS. Only Microsoft provides Azure. Only Google provides GCP. You can't peer into their source code, it is all proprietary and even secret.<p>- Has a poor debugging experience. Shared platforms can't generally allow "invasive" debugging for security reasons. Their sheer size and complexity will mean that your visibility will always be limited. You'll never been able to get a stack trace that crosses into the internal calls of the platform services like S3 or Lambda. Contrast this with typical debugging where you can even trace into the OS kernel if you so choose.<p>- Are generally based on the "print the logs out" feedback mechanism, with all the usual issues of mainframes such as hours-long delays.