• The bifurcation: infrastructure teams going deeper into primitives (bare metal K8s, service mesh) while app teams go higher-level (Vercel, Railway, Fly.io) • GPU shortage dynamics—CoreWeave raised $2B on GPU access alone; companies now choose providers by GPU quotas, not features • Technical deep dive: AWS datacenter-centric networking vs Google’s global VPC (5-10x better cross-region throughput), AWS 15 database services vs Google’s 3 opinionated platforms (Spanner defying CAP theorem with atomic clocks) • Edge computing revolution: Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy deliver sub-50ms global latency without load balancers or regional deployments—try doing that with traditional cloud • Multi-cloud specialization (not portability): BigQuery for data warehouses, Azure/GPU clouds for AI, Cloudflare for edge, AWS for ”boring logic your team knows” • Specialized clouds winning specific domains: PlanetScale (MySQL with Git-like branching), Neon (serverless Postgres scaling to zero), Turso (edge SQLite with sub-ms queries), Vercel/Netlify (frontend cloud) • Surprising players: Hetzner (unicorns running entire infra on bare metal), DigitalOcean App Platform, Oracle Cloud (absurdly generous free tier, legitimate bare metal performance) • Skills evolution—Table stakes: IaC, GitOps, FinOps (cost optimization is core engineering now). Less relevant: SSH debugging, manual server management. Emerging: WebAssembly (universal edge runtime), eBPF (kernel observability), platform engineering discipline • Hard-won wisdom: boring technology wins (Postgres ＞ ScyllaDB), data gravity is real (egress fees = lock-in), design for day-two operations (can you explain the 3 AM runbook?), complexity compounds (skeptical of microservices without dedicated platform teams) • Lock-in philosophy shift: ”Lock-in