A cloud hands you IP ranges, security groups, service accounts, IAM policies,

load balancer listeners and virtual machines. None of those is a place to put an

application. You get to one by assembling them, and the assembly is work: a few

days at the start of a project, an hour or two a week after that, for as long as

the project lives. It bills nothing. It ships no feature. Each team that does it

builds a private platform-as-a-service out of the same parts, and the one they

finish is as good as their best engineer's spare attention, which is not very

good. The other option is to pay an infrastructure salary for the same artifact.

The not-so-fun puzzle

Count the objects in the smallest useful deployment.…