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Does anyone else not feel so good about a future of computing where everything but the application layer is rented from Jeff Bezos?


I feel fine; one of the main selling points of cloud computing (as will be imprinted on you if you ever do an AWS course, sigh) is that before, if you wanted to launch a product, you had to invest in a huge amount of hardware first - just look at the first few years of Twitter where they were struggling to scale up. I mean yeah you could (and can) get managed hosting, rent some servers still at a lot of providers, often for cheaper than at Amazon, but scaling those out is not easy at all.

Nowadays? If Twitter launched today they would have had no trouble scaling up from one user to a hundred million within weeks. AWS is a major (MAJOR) factor in the startup boom, and allows for crazy levels of scaling for new startups that attract a lot of users. If you set up your stuff right before launch, getting slashdotted (or the HN variant) is a thing of the past. The only limit to scaling now is your credit limit.


I agree with you on this, it is a moral dilemna I think about every day. Programming was one of the few professions where the practitioner owned/had access to their tools in their own spare time. Across history and professions this is a rare property, and I fear that we might lose this in the next 10-20 years.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not reflect any positions held by my employer.


What I have access to with AWS just using their always free tier and their cheap offerings is more than I ever could have dreamed of 5 years ago, let alone as a hobbyist in my bedroom doing 65C02 assembly in the 80s.


It doesn't have to be Jeff Bezos. It could be anyone--like your IT team in your own company. Kubernetes already supports multiple serverless variants.

The significance is where the line of abstraction is drawn, as has been the case every time programming moves up an abstraction layer.


Developers are now in the same position system administrators were a decade ago when all of the infrastructure was moved to the cloud.


Cloud native has been the buzzword for a long time now, I don't see much difference with serverless in that regard.


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