[bane]

There's even the higher-level desire, what users really want isn't a place to run their app, but to the function the app provides. e.g. in a more micro-services-like environment with a service that simply looks things up in a database, what they really want is just query access to the data. But now they have the data in some db, the db in some container, some API written using the latest API style, some software the provide the API (also in a container), some container orchestration to coordinate everything, load balancers, caches and so on.

So there's all these layers of stuff that sit between the user and the data just to make the act of asking WHERE DATATHING="STUFF" convenient.