Martin Kleppmann

And so that's an idea that we really wanted to incorporate.

And we weave that in throughout the book.

So it's not just like one section here, but it's sort of an idea that we've integrated throughout the entire narrative.

Yeah, it's definitely a shift to different and higher level abstractions.

But that's been the story of the entire computing industry since the start.

It's like building new abstractions.

So it is true that if you rely on a higher level abstraction, you're no longer thinking about the lower level details.

And so if you're using a programming language with a garbage collector, you're no longer thinking about memory allocation.

And so is that a loss?

Well, maybe.

If you're building low level systems, you should still have to care about memory allocation.

If you're building higher level business logic, actually, I think it's just fine for people not to care about memory management.

So I think there's an analogous thing here with data systems that if you're building the higher level systems that don't need to particularly care about the underlying infrastructure, then that's fine.

Just use the higher level abstractions.

Nothing wrong with that.

But somebody still has to build those lower-level abstractions.

And from lower-level components, somebody's got to implement the cloud services.

And so those people will have to then specialize even more in actually the details of how you engineer those cloud services, how you make them reliable, how you operate them and so on.

The skills are still there.

It's just a bit of specialization happening that some people can worry about the higher level things without having to concern themselves with the lower level things.