Those "hyper-cloud" providers (and SaaS providers in general) keep increasing profits by reconfiguring the entire development industry in a way that favors the sell of their services and takes away all the required knowledge developers used to have when it came to developing and deploying solutions. Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people make software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some orchestration with service x or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Consulting companies who make software for others also benefit from this “reconfiguration” as they are able to hire more junior or less competent developers and transfer the complexities to those cloud services. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

All those new technologies keep pushing this “develop and deploy” quickly and commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.