My view of the cloud is fundamentally different from most people around me. They see it as an opportunity to build better infrastructure. I don’t. I see the cloud as the operating system that will run services and applications for me.

Different Ways to See the Cloud

When you’re a developer, you don’t think about infrastructure. You want to deploy your application, have it scale, and stay up. You need pipelines, routing, internal service connectivity, managed databases, and security guardrails — not servers.

When you’re an infrastructure engineer, the cloud looks like a better place to host your servers: no cables, no hard drives, no hardware lifecycle. It’s a natural extension of what you already know.

So which one are you?

The Role of Infrastructure Is Changing

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: developers no longer need the infrastructure team to provision VMs. They need the infrastructure team to get out of the way — and to provide the abstractions that make building fast and safe.

That doesn’t mean infrastructure engineers are obsolete. It means their job has changed. The cloud provides the primitives: compute, networking, storage, identity. Infrastructure teams should be building platforms on top of those — not managing the underlying machines.

The infra engineers who still require servers to deliver their services are the ones being displaced. The ones who think in terms of pipelines, guardrails, and developer experience? They’ve never been more valuable.

The Cloud as an OS — What That Actually Means

An operating system abstracts the hardware. You write code for Linux without caring about memory addresses or CPU registers. The OS handles it.

The cloud does the same thing at a higher level. AWS Lambda abstracts compute — you write a function, the cloud runs it. Cloud SQL abstracts databases — you connect, query, done. IAM abstracts permissions. API Gateway abstracts routing. You build on top of these without provisioning a single server.

That’s the shift. The cloud isn’t a better datacenter. It’s a platform you build on, just like an OS.

A Practical Example

If you need to run two DNS servers, but one must be a Linux server and the other a Windows server.

Would you:

• Use the native DNS software that comes with each OS and have vendor support but have to keep two different tools ?
• Install a third-party software that could run on both systems?
• Install a Linux VM on top of both OS so you can use the same system on both servers ?

Running infrastructure on the cloud is like 2 or 3 depending on the services you choose.

But when you mix different servers and operating systems to use what they do best, Linux for applications, Windows for specific workloads and Mac for work, you’re using different tools for different needs. Apply that same thinking to the cloud, and you have true multicloud.

The Bottom Line

Don’t use the cloud as a datacenter where you replicate your on-prem infrastructure. Use it as the operating system that runs your developers’ applications — and let managed services handle everything else.