Spotify is an interesting example to bring up, & somewhat a sore one for me. Because their Spotify Apps API was in effect an attempt to make Spotify a music cloud. It was, in my view, raringly successful, a great system that thousands of people built intensely good and new music experiences on, embedded within the Spotify desktop app. It turned the desktop client into a cloud-run system for rapid music app deployment, all inside the Spotify walled-garden.
Then Spotify killed it. A decision which continues to baffle me, and which, like Signals recent decision to abandon SMS, speaks mainly of a desperation to completely own the experience. https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2014/03/24/clos...
So Spotify is now an example of a dead end, a former cloud, a mere product to me. They've taken great works from the past & about, and they've built one product, and they're going to spend decades moving around where the buttons are and trying to tweak how and when they can ring the cash register & deposit some money into Spotify, Inc. They're from the cloud (sort of), but they've wound back 90% of their ambition to be or contribute to clouds.
Spotify (& many others) can build what they build because of a conflux of factors. Simply having gobs more hard drive, cpu, network throughput, and (most important of all) new online consumers are the core hard & fast requirement that enabled Spotify to become Spotify. But that's only semi-related to what I think is really at the heart of this conversation: the cloud. Yes the team was good about scaling out & aggressively deploying new technologies, devops & core tech, and that helped them go. But it's confusing & unhelpful as a case study. Fact is: switches were just getting better, cpus were just getting better, and Spotify could almost certainly have happened in a fairly legacy way, with fairly legacy ideas, & there'd been streaming before, albeit executing & attracting/keeping necessary talent would have had worse odds on legacy ideas.
Yes: from a consumer perspective, Spotify leverages the internet to on-demand deliver content. It's an example of most of the computing happening in a far off neo-mainframe. That's absolutely something we associate with the cloud. I absolutely see that as core to Erik's story here.
But the characteristic seems somewhat uninteresting to me in isolation. I do think more scale out abstractions & ideas have a huge place, a huge future, but also, they keep running into the "then all developers are just consumers of shit they really have no idea of or power over" problem that means there's no real social environment surrounding these advances.
Something that seemed real to me from these threads: the comment griping about never managing firewall rules by hand rings true. And we are developing control planes aka controllers aka operators, are building more intent-based autonomic systems, reasonably well, that do our lifting for us. There's a host of good new "edge" (not edgy edge edge, just like, lots of data centers edge) tech that's also like- yeah- cloud it up more. Think less about computers/resources/clusters, just push code. These are all in the heart of cloud, of making available various grid computing/utility computing notions that have circled around for a long time, of making us think less specifics. And I think that's indeed true & powerful. But it keeps running into the asocial problem above, that there's no social environment, most of the secret-sauce is retained, locked inside the neo-mainframe.
CloudFlare and Deno seemingly are some of the only two who seem to realize the Tim O'Reilly adage that I hear no-where near enough this decade: "Create more value than you capture." Or else your dream is going to some day die as your dream, with yes maybe good marks, but no real lasting success. If cloud computing is to be a future of real note, it has to be a shared one. That's been an exceedingly brutal gauntlet that few technological/cloudogical would-be's have proven their advance through.