We used to have that, but it's hard to support as you scale. The level of effort is somewhat quadratic to company size: linear in the number of services you support and in the number of engineers you have to support. Also divergent use cases come up that don't quite fit, and suddenly the infra team is the bottleneck to feature delivery, and people just start doing their own thing. Once that Pandora's Box is opened, it's essentially impossible to claw your way back.
I've heard of largeish companies that still manage to do this well, but I'd love to learn how.
That said, yeah I agree this is the biggest accomplishment. Getting dev cycles down from hours or days to minutes is more important than getting them down from minutes to 25% fewer minutes.
Like if you have logic apps and azure Data pipelines, how do you create and more importantly keep current the local development equivalents for those?
I'm not saying if you are YouTube that all the videos on YouTube must fit on a developer's local machine but would be nice if you could run the whole instance locally or if not, at least be able to reproduce the whole set up on a different environment without six months worth of back and forth emails.
Yeah, the whole top down vs bottom up quandary. Top down is more boring but easier to support at scale. Bottom up is more dynamic but cross cutting changes end up taking inordinate effort.
I've heard of largeish companies that still manage to do this well, but I'd love to learn how.
That said, yeah I agree this is the biggest accomplishment. Getting dev cycles down from hours or days to minutes is more important than getting them down from minutes to 25% fewer minutes.