"Don’t bet on ephemeral cloud abstractions"

Really good piece based on lessons from building out eBay’s cloud infrastructure.

“Ephemeral abstractions are things that fail. These may not recover from failures. The best example is a compute (e.g. a VM) with a local disk, an IP address and a hostname.”

and

“You still need the ability to create parts (e.g. a VM or a network port or a block of storage) when creating durable abstractions, but most users of cloud shouldn’t have to deal with such operations.”