[tiarafawn]

I agree that the number of different technologies here is shocking, but you get a lot more value as a result than "just to run your applications". Most notably that includes CI/CD, scaling, and redundancy, all with IaC. These things used to require a lot more administration and development effort.

Plugging together all these different tools has become so much work though that in many organizations the platform team(s) who are mainly occupied with doing just that take up a lot of engineering resources.

In my opinion the next evolutionary step would be for all of this to be bundled and abstracted away. Funnily enough, we pretty much have that product already with autoscaled "serverless" cloud services, GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps pipelines etc.

The biggest problem is probably that things like AWS Lambda, SQS, and DDB lack versatility and user friendliness. If we get some improvements on that front, many organizations might opt for that instead of dealing with their own K8s deployments. Even better would be if we had something like a stripped-down version of OpenStack, just focussed on doing "serverless" right, and rebuilt from the ground up.