Similar age and skillset here though much more comfortable on the operations end of things rather than the development side though I have built small apps that

Similar age and skillset here though much more comfortable on the operations end of things rather than the development side though I have built small apps that did see some production use which was cool to do. It's a wide-ranging skillset no doubt, but still built on the work that precedes it. Did you build the servers that ran your code? Rack them and set up the networking? Build redundant power systems for them? HVAC? I'm sure you've done some of that, but no one person can really do it all. I think the saying is something like, "fish don't know they're wet"; meaning that they're so adapted to the ocean that they don't really have any idea that there are other ways to live. I get that feeling when I hear older folks talk about working on mainframes - it just sounds like an alien world. I came of age in the era of distributed systems - Microsoft vs Open Source, but it was always on commodity x86 hardware and TCP networks. There's no law of the universe that said it had to evolve that way. It seems like the new way is "cloud-native" which I'm not sure I understand or like (as I've said, it may just be me getting old); my biggest problem is that it seems to give ever more power to Amazon and other members of the tech oligolopoly rather than any technical shortcoming.