I think that PaaS and BaaS where you don't have access to the back end is a dead end. It's going to go the way of Windows Server. Open source solutions will always win in the end when it comes to developers.
People also balked during the transition away from FTP. SSHing into servers is precisely the thing you want to get away from whether it's to change code or to hotfix your nginx.conf or to do a quick apt-get install.
Doesn't mean that we don't need SSH ever, but 99% of the time it's something we use because we're too lazy to setup automation.
I reckon you're using open-source here to mean self-hosted, but that doesn't really change anything. For example, the reason every small company I've worked at didn't have a way to analyze their logs/stderr and coincide them with other events for debugging was because they didn't, not because they couldn't.
"FTP -> SSH -> proprietary console" does not look like evolution over a gradient of control to me. I don't understand why you're comparing FTP to SSH when SSH is lower level than FTP. FTP "throw it on the server and let mod_php deal with it" deployments were decidedly higher level than SSH-based ones. FTP deployments were often coupled with GUI-based steps, for instance database migrations run from Drupal web app.
You are always going to have to rely on other service providers for critical things - networking, power, etc. I don’t think there is going to be some massive move for every business to be in control of every aspect of their supply chain. It simply isn’t feasible.
It's different. If a business has the option to do something themselves and doing so would cost them less in the long run and give them more flexibility, then doing it themselves is a competitive advantage.
If having solar panels becomes consistently cheaper than buying electricity from the grid (per megawatt), then individuals and businesses will all switch to solar panels... Especially if the business uses a lot of electricity.
The main reason that PaaS solution are popular now is because of advertising and hype. It's a bubble.
That is interesting, because the advice I always hear for businesses is to keep in house their core business and contract/outsource everything else. That 'bring everything in house' strategy only works for the biggest companies that have enough scale.
For almost everyone else, the cost of providing a profit margin to the contracting company is dwarfed by the savings you get from the economy of scale the contractor is able to provide.
Really, this is the microeconomics version of the ideas behind free trade. It is better to produce what you are best at and trade for the rest.
I think that any business which hires developers in-house should consider their software systems as being their core business. That's were the competitive edge comes from.
Most companies who use BaaS or PaaS these days already hire developers and sometimes even DevOps engineers; for them it doesn't make sense to outsource huge parts of their software. Some open source systems just work really well.
For example, I tried several times to launch a business around my current popular open source project but it hasn't worked so far; the problem I have is that companies only need consulting for a short while at the beginning to adapt the system to their use case and then it just works perfectly so they dont need me anymore.
When I reach out to a previous customer who didn't contact me in months, it's very common to hear that the system has been running perfectly without any issues at all. Even a couple of companies which have millions of users. Most of them never needed any consulting at all. So yes, it's much cheaper for a company in the long run to self-host in many cases.
Doesn't mean that we don't need SSH ever, but 99% of the time it's something we use because we're too lazy to setup automation.
I reckon you're using open-source here to mean self-hosted, but that doesn't really change anything. For example, the reason every small company I've worked at didn't have a way to analyze their logs/stderr and coincide them with other events for debugging was because they didn't, not because they couldn't.