I expect the mainframe model will re-emerge at some point. Paying for consumption instead of capacity is just too attractive. One thing that would make this ea

I expect the mainframe model will re-emerge at some point. Paying for consumption instead of capacity is just too attractive. One thing that would make this easier would be a shift towards systems like LegoOS[0]. Instead of a host-centric design, you directly attach hardware components to a "fast enough" network, each with a little bit of local controlling logic. So there are no hosts per se, just a pool of CPUs, a pool of RAM, a pool of disks etc. It wouldn't be suitable for workloads where locality dominates flexibility. But in the long run, it could be very useful for scale economies. Especially since different workloads have different patterns of demand for CPU, RAM and disk. [0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-shan.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-shan.pdf