Avoiding Cloud Lock-in

Listen in as our co-founder Jye Cusch describes Nitric’s approach to avoiding lock-in and making the framework less opaque. Hear one of the many lessons learned while building the open source framework and navigating cloud development.

Video Transcript

There's nothing that's going to be committed to Nitric that was intentionally there to lock you into it. If it's there, it's a mistake, feel free to raise it. Otherwise, we're trying to make it so that you're not trading one lock in for another in order to move fast. That defeats the point of what we wanted to do.

One of the problems we're working on is Nitric can feel a bit opaque sometimes. Like, Oh, I have no idea how that works under the hood. Sometimes that's fine, but we've got a number of people that like, “I don't want any kind of magic happening in my stack. I want to know how it all works.” And I always thought, oh, well, you can read our Pulumi code. That's too low for a lot of people. So I think that's a fair response.

We're actually going to be working on some more comprehensive documentation through this year as well. That lays out not just how we've done the deployments, but why we've made certain tech decisions. There are a whole bunch of stuff that we've done in Nitric that's me and Tim, who are pretty experienced with this stuff, struggling for a day or two or a week on something, finally cracking it, and going, Oh, man, I'm so glad that's in the framework now, because the next person won't have to deal with that.

We found weird things. For example, if you deploy to AWS API gateway, and you use an open API spec, a swagger spec to deploy the routes and do all the configuration. If you have tags in there, but also try to tag the resource in Terraform or in Pulumi, the first deployment will use the tags from the Swagger spec. The second deployment will use them from the resource and replace the old tags. Oh, okay. Well, we'll just put the same tags in both places. Problem solved.

There's a whole bunch of little, you know, three years of little lessons like that through Nitric. So I think it'd be great for us to write more about those things as well.

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