I started programming in the 90's and continue to do so to this day (though in a limited capacity since I'm managing teams). I frequently see things that would have had very simple/dumb solutions 20 years ago[1], which now seem to require complicated tools, libraries or services.

Two examples:

I recently saw an engineer provision an S3 bucket to store a temporary file that is only needed for the current session, and only accessible to the application that created it. For me, this is what the local file system is for.

I saw another engineer provision an in-memory key-value store to store some infrequently changing reference data that can be easily loaded at startup, in an application runtime where memory persists between requests. For me, this is what local heap memory is for. I would simply load the data into a singleton map.

Both of these services have legitimate use cases, but I can't help but wonder whether they (and other tools and services I won't go into here) are beginning to make programmers forget that our applications run on machines with a standard set of resources (CPU, memory, disk, network interface) made available through an operating system, and further abstracted by the API provided by the development platform.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[1] The systems I worked on were non-trivial and mission critical: capital market trading systems. So it's not a case of those "dumb" solutions being either non-resilient, non-performant or unmaintainable.