Kill It with Fire

progress in technology is not linear. It’s cyclical. We advance, but we advance slowly, while moving tangentially. We abandon patterns only to reinvent them later and sell them as completely new. Technology advances not by building on what came before, but by pivoting from it. We take core concepts from what exists already and modify them to address a gap in the market; then we optimize around filling in that gap until that optimization has aggregated all the people and use cases not covered by the new tech into its own distinct market that another “advancement” will capture. In other words, the arms race around data centers left smaller organizations behind and created a demand for the commercial cloud. Optimizing the cloud for customization and control created the market for managed platforms and eventually serverless computing. The serverless model will feed its consumers more and more development along its most appealing features until the edge cases where serverless approaches don’t quite fit start to find common ground among each other. Then a new product will come out that will address those needs.