The First Question Has Changed
Here's something that would've sounded heretical five years ago: the most important thing AWS ever sold developers wasn't EC2. It was permission to stop fretting about servers.
That sounds obvious now, but back when getting infrastructure meant waiting on procurement cycles, hardware deliveries, and whatever arcane process stood between a developer and a running machine — it was close to magical. AWS turned all of that into a credit card and an API.
The company still (over)uses a great phrase for what it removed: undifferentiated heavy lifting. All the mess associated with racking servers, patching operating systems, managing storage, planning capacity — important work, sure, but not the work that makes your application special. Let AWS do that, the company intoned, and developers could focus on what 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. And 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 something else entirely: How quickly can I get this thing working?
That is a different question. And it leads to different tools.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
The Data: Cloud Is Blurring Into Something Else
Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first. 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 survey is where things get interesting, because the "cloud development" category no longer reads like a clear 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 the point: developers aren't simply choosing a different cloud first. Often, they're not choosing a cloud at all. They're choosing a workflow, and a workflow is an increasingly separate decision from the underlying cloud.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
The First Mile Has Moved — And It's AI-Powered Now
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 Code, 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.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
Platforms Winning Mindshare by Exposing Less Cloud
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. 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: 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.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
What Is Agentic AI? And Why It Accelerated the Shift
For an AI application, the opening move often isn't where do you host it, but rather which model, which agent framework will get you to a live application fastest. This is where the concept of agentic AI becomes central — and why understanding it matters for anyone building in this space.
IBM defines agentic AI as a class of artificial intelligence systems designed to autonomously accomplish goals by perceiving their environment, reasoning about next steps, and taking actions — often using tools and APIs to interact with external systems. Unlike traditional AI that responds to prompts, agentic AI initiates action sequences, plans multi-step workflows, and adapts when conditions change.
Google Cloud frames agentic AI with specific differentiators: autonomous goal-setting, tool use (calling APIs, databases, other services), multi-step reasoning over complex tasks, and the ability to operate with minimal human intervention. The key distinction Google draws is between assisting (the AI helps you do something) and acting (the AI does something on your behalf).
This distinction matters because it explains why the developer first mile has shifted. When you can hand a coding agent your codebase and say "build me an auth flow," the question of which cloud provider to use becomes secondary. The opening move is about capability and speed — not infrastructure.
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 codebase and helps you build, test, and ship.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
What Is an Embodied Agent? The Physical World Connection
You might wonder: if agentic AI is about software agents acting autonomously, what's an embodied agent? The distinction matters because the line between digital and physical AI is blurring fast.
An embodied agent is an AI system that operates through a physical body or interface in the real world — not just software processes. Think robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, or any system that perceives physical environments and acts upon them. The "embodiment" refers to having a physical form that interacts with the world: sensors for perception, actuators for movement, and computational systems for decision-making.
The connection to agentic AI is direct. An embodied agent is an agentic system — it autonomously perceives, reasons, and acts. But the stakes are higher because physical actions have physical consequences. A software agent that makes a wrong API call wastes tokens. An embodied agent that misjudges distance breaks something.
This is why companies like Vercel are now building "agentic infrastructure" — platforms designed to ship apps and agents, with coding agents deploying in their native language, sandboxed VMs for agent execution, and automated error investigation. The infrastructure itself is becoming agentic.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
The Second Mile Still Belongs to Hyperscalers
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: 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.
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html
Hiding the Cloud: The Strategic Choice for Infrastructure Vendors
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.
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…
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4192947/why-developers-are-over-the-cloud.html