[roeme]

I think it's safe to invoke Betteridge's Law here.

Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary).

The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein.

Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.

[dilemma]

It's even older than mainframe vs microcomputers. It'd centralization vs distribution, and its the fundamental question to human life, which is necessarily social and therefore needs organization.

Interestingly, the answer is always "both", just in different ways. AWS could be used as an example argue that technology and society is becoming more centralized, and that it is becoming more distributed. It's all about what your focus is.