[whummer]

Agreed, that's really stunning - seen the analogy of cloud as the "modern mainframe" come up more and more recently.

I guess the (business) reason is that the centralized computing model enables enormous economies of scale. (Makes perfect sense from an operations point of view.)

What it seems to miss in the current incarnation/iteration, though, is the "power of distribution" - leveraging the fact that local compute capabilities (especially during development/integration) can help reduce the cognitive load, increase the efficiency, and thereby reduce overall costs.

There seems to be a tendency to focus mostly on the operational aspects, rather than the overall end-to-end developer journey. What remains to be seen is whether future iterations of "the cloud" will do a better job of embracing the power of distributed and/or hybrid.

[kongin]

The reason why AWS got popular everywhere I worked was that you didn't need to get buying new hardware past ops. You just spun up your own, then when it was supporting half the business you pointed at it and said "Gee wouldn't it be nice if we had a box in our own data center to run it?" then there'd be a fire lit under the ass of ops and you'd get your computers in a week instead of next financial year.

Now it's exactly the same thing in AWS. My next guess is that you're going to be running production code on fleets of devs computers because you don't have to get extra budget for AWS next financial year to afford spinning up another instance.