These valuations are not an accident, but a reflection of the demand for lower operational responsibilities on the part of both organization and developer alike. These abstractions, which allow developers to make challenges such as authentication, commerce, identity, search and so on someone else’s problem, are exploding in popularity. The conventional wisdom says that most developers, given the opportunity in a vacuum to reimplement services that have already been built, will. Even if this were true, however, developers no longer have that luxury. Pushed to move quickly, developers today are meeting those demands by narrowing the scope of their own workloads, which is accomplished in turn by offloading discrete functional areas to third party managed services.
(emphasis mine)
Supported by our friend Steve, who works at a large enterprise:
https://twitter.com/Stv/status/1323801075019755520
The technology industry today may not be ready to offer the mass market buyer the technology equivalent of a house. But there is ample evidence to suggest that we’re drifting away from sending buyers and developers alike out into a maze of aisles, burdening them with the task of picking primitives and assembling from scratch. If the first era of the cloud is defined by primitives, its days are coming to an end. The next is likely to be defined by, as the computing industry has since its inception, the abstractions we build on top of those primitives. Whether those abstractions take the form of a house, however, has yet to be determined.
Also very notable is that Redmonk calls out everybody “except Heroku”. What we observed is that Heroku was / is outgrown by their largest customers. There is no “on prem” or “open source” version of Heroku, and so their largest customers re-implement a subset of Heroku on top of AWS/Azure/GCP.
Fission’s approach to being open source and federating our platform – so that our largest customers CAN run their own Fission platform, and still interconnect with us – avoids this, and positions to be this higher level abstraction.
Azure, notably, doesn’t have a Heroku-equivalent at all, so getting Fission running on Azure would be interesting.