My challenge at $dayjob is that it takes months to spin up a new cloud service because they’re new.

Either a new app that wasn’t on the cloud before — in which case the templates need extensive customisation.

Or, new app in the sense that the devs just cracked open Visual Studio and have no idea yet what they actually need from the cloud.

I get maybe 10-20 copies of a template (dev/tst/prd + ha/dr), and then I have to start from the beginning.

Guidance on how to maximise reusability would actually be very useful.

Unfortunately, in the real world, this seems difficult. Many small variations in requirements tends to make abstractions leaky.

For example, one vendor requires active-passive load balancing for licensing reasons. Millions of dollars worth of licensing reasons. Neither AWS nor Azure support anything but active-active in any of their load balancers. (They do in DNS, but for various reasons that won’t work for us.)

Another “new” app (industrial air quality monitoring) is actually from the stone ages and doesn’t support PaaS databases or even 3 of the 4 clustering modes available in IaaS. So a custom load balancer solution is required… just for it.

This is the issue. Everyone that loves the cloud and says it’s simple has easy mode turned on: cookie cutter clones they can stamp out for many identical customers or whatever.

Some people play the game with “big government” difficulty.