You can be forgiven if you think the most important thing AWS ever sold developers was EC2. It’s not. No, AWS’s big gift to developers was permission to stop fretting about servers. That sounds obvious now, but it was close to magical at the time. Before the cloud, getting infrastructure meant waiting on procurement, hardware, and the somewhat arcane process that stood between a developer and a running machine. AWS turned that into a credit card and an API.
It was awesome.
AWS still (over)uses a great phrase for what it removed: “undifferentiated heavy lifting.” That is, all the mess associated with racking servers, patching operating systems, managing storage, planning capacity, etc. Important work, sure, but not the work that makes your application special. Let AWS do that, the company intoned, and developers could focus on the thing their customers actually cared about.
It was a brilliant abstraction. It helped build one of the most important technology companies of the past two decades. It’s also the same logic that increasingly makes the cloud seem superfluous. Not because the cloud is dying. It isn’t. The cloud is bigger and more essential than ever. But developers don’t begin by asking, “Which cloud should I use?” They begin with, “How quickly can I get this thing working?”
That is a different question, and it leads to different tools.
Where to begin?
Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: AWS remains the biggest developer cloud, and its revenue growth has accelerated in the wake of AI. In the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, AWS was the top cloud platform, used by 48% of respondents. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud followed at 27.8% and 25.1%, respectively.
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer survey is more interesting, however, because the “cloud development” category no longer reads like a clear cloud-vendor horse race. Docker jumped 17 points to 71% usage, followed by npm and then AWS at 43%. Kubernetes, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Terraform, Firebase, Vercel, Netlify, and Supabase all show up in the same mental map.
This is my point: Developers aren’t simply choosing a different cloud first. Often, they’re not choosing a cloud first at all. They’re choosing a workflow, and a workflow is an increasingly separate decision from the underlying cloud.
The first mile moved
For a long time, AWS owned the first mile. If you wanted to build something, you opened an AWS account. Need compute? Launch EC2. Storage? S3. Whatever a developer needed—database, queue, function, CDN, identity layer—AWS, the “everything store,” almost certainly had an answer.
It was magical! Then it became the norm. And, over time, it became a lot. The “everything store” arguably had too much, making it hard for developers to know how to use it effectively. The developer’s question became, “How much AWS do I have to understand before I can ship?” Developers increasingly don’t want to answer that question at the start.
The first mile now often begins in GitHub, which says more than 36 million developers joined in a single year. Or it begins in VS Code, which keeps winning because it’s familiar, extensible, and already open. Or it begins in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Codex, and the broader AI coding layer. GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse says nearly 80% of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Stack Overflow’s 2025 AI survey results point the same way, with 84% of respondents using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% in 2024.
The starting point is changing. The default interface to building software is becoming an AI-assisted workflow, not a cloud console. This doesn’t make the cloud less important, but it definitely makes it less visible.
The joy of not caring
The developer platforms with momentum right now are winning because they expose less cloud infrastructure. Call it serverless if you like, but it’s deeper than AWS Lambda ever was. AWS Lambda still made you think in AWS. These new platforms make you think in your app.
Take Vercel. It didn’t win developer mindshare by offering more than 200 services and praying developers would navigate them all. Instead, it attached itself to the way many front-end and full-stack developers already work: GitHub, Next.js, previews, deployments, performance, and a short path from code to live application. It seems to be working: Reuters reported last year that Vercel raised $300 million at a $9.3 billion valuation, after doubling its user base and growing revenue 82%.
Cloudflare offers a similar promise from a different angle, as I’ve written: deploy globally, run close to users, scale automatically, and don’t make infrastructure the developer’s first problem. Supabase does the same for data, wrapping Postgres with authentication, instant APIs, edge functions, real-time subscriptions, storage, and vectors so the database feels less like a separate system and more like an app platform.
None of this is anti-cloud. But it’s very definitely stripping away the need to even think about cloud. And it’s just as definitely where developers are focused today.
AI accelerated all of this because it changed the first question developers ask. For an AI application, the opening move often isn’t where do you host it, but rather which model, which agent framework, etc., will get you to a live application fastest? For this reason, OpenAI’s developer platform isn’t framed as renting infrastructure. It’s framed as building with models, APIs, tools, docs, and examples. Similarly, Anthropic’s Claude Code isn’t positioned as configuring a cloud environment; it’s an agentic coding system that works in your code base and helps you build, test, and ship.
The second mile matters more
I’m not saying the cloud vendors should abandon hope. Indeed, though the first mile has moved away from the hyperscalers, the second mile is still very much theirs to win.
Vercel, Cloudflare, Supabase, OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub are brilliant at helping developers make something work, fast. But in the enterprise, “fast” isn’t the key priority: Enterprises eventually need the boring stuff like identity, network controls, observability, cost management, compliance, and the rest of the unglamorous apparatus that keeps customer data from leaking onto Reddit.
Boring is good when boring means the thing works.
This is where AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and other infrastructure companies should have an advantage. But it won’t be enough to say, “We have the grown-up features.” That’s true, but it’s dull, and in this case, “dull” isn’t a winning proposition. No, the strategic challenge for the hyperscalers is to make the jump from prototype to production feel like an upgrade instead of a punishment.
AWS’s new $1 billion investment in forward-deployed AI engineers is interesting for exactly this reason. AWS says the new organization will embed experts with customers to co-develop and deploy agentic AI solutions in days. That’s not classic bottom-up developer love, but it’s a smart recognition that the bottleneck has moved closer to the application. The hard part is turning capability into a working system, not merely getting access to infrastructure or a model.
Yep. Exactly.
Hiding the cloud
The mistake for cloud infrastructure companies would be to respond to this by trying to become a Vercel, Supabase, GitHub, OpenAI, or Anthropic all at once. That’s the classic incumbent move, and it rarely works. The better move is narrower: become the most natural next step when the prototype starts to matter.
That means meeting developers where they work: GitHub, VS Code, Cursor-style environments, CI/CD systems, and AI agents. It means outcome-native starts: deploy this app, connect this data, expose this API, add auth, evaluate this agent, secure this workflow, move this prototype into production. It means fewer scavenger hunts across product pages and establishing more golden paths (yes, even if that infuriates a service team that gets left out).
The old question was, “Can you run my workload?” For AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and others, the answer is almost always yes. But no one is impressed by this anymore. Therefore, the better question is, “Can you become part of how I build?”
Developers came to the cloud because it was the easiest way to get infrastructure. They’re shifting to developer experience platforms because those are the easiest way to get outcomes. If the cloud providers can become part of the first mile before the Vercels of the world become part of the second mile, they’ll win, and big. If they don’t, well….