But to the point of the original question that started this thread - the takeaway is still that cloud services made development massively easier right? The answ

But to the point of the original question that started this thread - the takeaway is still that cloud services made development massively easier right? The answer to the original question seems to still be "Yes cloud providers did lead to big wins for customers" since none of these other suggestions are able to get away from needing a cloud service provider without making starting something intensely difficult. And you wouldn't be able to get a vps for 5 bucks for ingress without all the other cloud competition in the market. > Cloud infra may be a comparable market, since computation is a big share of AI costs. Did consumers win big from competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP? Not sure. I see an uptick in write ups saying “We switched off cloud and reduced costs by 2/3rds.” Not a scientific sample but may leave the question open.