If a social media platform is running smoothly, but the engineers leave, why can’t a platform continue to run on autopilot?

Question

I guess this is applicable to any social media platform or other similar systems. Is it because there are always bugs to address, so it’s never really running smoothly, or other reasons?

In: 153

Answer 1

Cloud server can go down. Network congestion can cause problems and may need manual rerouting. A bug could throw an exception that takes down a prod service. A service could encouter unexpected behavior and may need maintenance. Autoscaling could fail. Reverse proxies may need cache resets. A soft attack could spam hella unfriendly shit. A hard attack could brick the whole company. None of these can be fully automated without a human level AI that can conquer all sorts of edge cases.