How would you explain cloud/serverless tech to a web dev from 2008?

Question

The problem scenario lies from my vantage point of having almost zero exposure to cloud or serverless, CI/CD tooling at work, despite having worked in the web dev field since that time. I mainly focus on code output, but I've hit a wall when it comes to learning how applications are set up on the cloud, setting up services, automation and whatnot.Consider an average web dev from that period, who may be working professionally but in small-scale operations, and not in big corp settings.After reeling from the shock of the pandemic worldwide, they need to make themselves relevant for most web development work in 2020. Automated build and deploy is now as bread and butter skill today as spinning up a LAMP stack was 12 years ago.If you were to show a web developer from that time period what cloud and serverless products are, and how they can be used, how should you explain it to them? And what resources would be the best for them to learn considering what they may already know?

benjaminjosephw · Accepted Answer

Here's a cynical take: Very few people manage their own virtual machines anymore and cloud vendors have been happy to take over and package all kinds of hosting options as services. If you're building something quickly, this is a massive boon since you can assemble a pretty complex application using a number of off-the-shelf cloud services. The downside is that vendor lock-in is 10x as strong as it was a decade ago and it's very easy to become dependent on a particular provider's set of services or to have your configuration rules tied in to their particular Identity and Access Management model.
You're probably going to want to learn about containerization and Docker unless you want to go higher-level with services like Vercel or Netlify (both in the same kind of space as Heroku). The service offerings on AWS, GCP and Azure are worth taking a look at too to get a grounding for what's out there.
Most cloud providers have a fair amount of overlap in what they offer but they've each got their own versions of services with their own quirks. Whatever you choose to dig into, you're best off picking one provider's platform to learn and understand in more detail before seeing how those concepts translate to other providers - otherwise there's just too much ground to cover.
Although most new services and tools are vendor specific, the fundamental ideas have largely converged so don't feel too overwhelmed. At the end of the day, it all still just boils down to VMs managed by someone else.