Platform · 2006–now · Cloud Scale
AWS / public cloud default
Elastic compute and a thousand services as the default datacenter. Cloud Scale without naming the cloud was a museum hole.
Why AWS / public cloud default stuck
AWS stuck because CapEx avoidance, APIs, and a hiring market that speaks S3/IAM beat racking servers. It failed as "cloud-agnostic by default" theater — most shops are multi-cloud in slides and single-cloud in invoices. Lock-in is real; so is the exit cost of not using it.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 2014–now
Kubernetes
Container orchestration that became the cloud's OS. Overkill for many; unavoidable for many others.
Platform · 2013–now
Docker / Containers
Ship the environment with the code. The packaging unit of modern compute.
Platform · 2014–now
Terraform
Declarative infra with state files everyone learns to fear. The closest thing to versioned datacenters — then BSL and OpenTofu.
Architecture · 2015–2024
Serverless-first
Functions as the unit of deploy. Brilliant for spikes and glue; awkward as a whole product architecture.