Distributed · Resilient · Simple

The rise of mobile forced deep changes in the way GUIs are built. To a lesser extent, it also affected how apps are built.

The rising tide of connected devices will force deep changes in the way apps are built. Many apps will not have any UI.

This is happening now, under the name microservices. These are distributed, resilient, interdependent, scalable, and relatively simple computation resources.

People First

Computers are the most powerful, versatile tools that humans have created.

In a few short decades, computers have gone from nonexistent to affecting nearly everyone's life in some way. Many people use computers, but only via the confines of the apps built by a relatively tiny percentage.

Access to, and direct use of, computers is the most radical transformation of human society since the rise of democracy.

The Third Wave

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was the first large-scale shift toward abstracting computation resources.

Following this, first generation PaaS (Platform as a Service) promised simpler production environments by generalizing the platform for running apps.

Amazon Lambda is nearly pure CaaS (Compute as a Service). The platform and infrastructure are abstracted away, leaving only the app as computation.

Compute combines three ideas: broad access to computation resources, languages to solve problems, and a platform for understanding your apps.