I was commenting to a friend that the limited functionality in these types of services have very steep edges. It's great when you're in the middle, but trying t

I was commenting to a friend that the limited functionality in these types of services have very steep edges. It's great when you're in the middle, but trying to do something a little bit different can lead to long, poor, difficult code as you try to work around the constraint. I think we'll start seeing more "opinionated" platforms, similar to what Rails and others have done for web development. Parsing query strings, managing database connections, and wiring your own user reg code are all distant memories for most web developers most of the time today. We might see something similar here, where groups of common functions or services are stacked together to form a unit that works well together and covers some set of use cases very well. LAMP comes to mind as a comparison, and you can definitely use SQL Server instead of MySQL, but it probably won't work as well when it comes down to drivers, libraries, recruiting, etc. These stacks will differ as well to serve a broad range of customers. I cringe a bit when I see Amazon EC2 comparisons to Hetzner or Digital Ocean because they are serving quite a different set of customers with different needs. To think that all hosts should end up standardizing on the same units would leave many customers unserved. It's easy for innovation to be called vendor lock-in, but it's hard to compete or innovate on heavily commoditized products/services. It's [still] an exciting time to be in tech.