Simpler and monolith (an endlessly re-suggested reply) has it's place, but I see it as impossible for any "simple" solution to ever gain enough mindshare to win. A lot of people suggesting monoliths & hosted services, but they are never going to have the community, the presence of something like Kubernetes, which unites people, which people collaborate over, in the same way we all got to learn & experience & co-develop for Docker. The question posted somewhat gets it wrong, "Kubernetes became a thing after Docker became a thing (and so on," implies that they're different things, that tech is about different things, but in many ways Kubernetes is a natural extension & outgrowth, it is a part of the Docker scene, & has continuity with it.

Kubernetes is a thing now, but it's patterns are still underspoken of, underpracticed, underdeployed to the rest of the software world. We will get better at being like Kubernetes, for great benefit. Folks learning how control-loops are advantageous, and learning to use universal API Servers for all their systems will continue to drive not just Kubernetes, but the patterns underlying Kubernetes further into our applications & services & technologies. Tech like KCP[1] is an early indicator of this interest, in using the soul of kubernetes if not it's specific machinery, by creating an independent, non-Kubernetes, but Kubernetes compatible API Server. Having universal storage, having autonomic system control are huge advantages when system building, and gaining those benefits is fairly easy, with or without Kubernetes itself.

I'm hoping we see a DIY cloud'ing become more of a thing. Leaving everything in the hands of hyperscalers is a puzzling and hard to imagine state of affairs, given the hardware nirvana we've experienced in the past two plus decades. Kubernetes is the first viable multi-system operational paradigm, the first diy-able cloud we have, and it's shocking it took that long, but smaller practitioners getting good at converting their sea of individual boxes into something more resembling the Single System Image dreams of old, albeit through a highly indirect Kubernetes-ish route, is a decade or decades long quest we seemingly just started in to a couple years ago.

I'm hoping eventually ubiquotous and pervasive computing starts to dovetail with this world, that we start to have better view & visibility of all the computing resources around us, via standardized, well known interfaces. Rather than the hodgepodge of manufacturer controlled, invisible, un-debuggable overlay networks that alas, constitute the vast majority of the use of the internet these days. Alas the news there is never good, the new Matter standard is, like Thread, inaccessible, unviewable; consumers are expected to remain dumb, ignorant, unaware of how any of it works, merely thankful for whatever magic they receive[2]. But as a home-cloud, as the manor re-establishes computing as base & competency for itself (#ManorCompute), & as good projects like WebThings[3] or whatever takes it's place light the darkened damp corridors only robots patrolled, I hope for a reawakening, hope a silent majority becomes more real & known, hope the fed up, sick of this shit, disgusted with remote-service-based technology world starts to manifest & apply real pressure to emerge a healthy, pro-human, pro-user ubiquotous & pervasive computing that gives us an honest shake, that shows what it is, that integrates into our personal home clouds.

I think there's a huge pent up demand & desire for flow-based/evented systems, for Yahoo Pipes, for Node-RED[4]. The paradigm needs help, I think there's too many missing pieces for something like Node-RED to be the one, but re-emerging user-control, giving us ALL flexible means to compute, is key. Exposing & embracing some level of technical literacy is something people want, but no one knows how to articulate it or what they want. We're mired in a "faster horses" stage, and it's fundamentally incorrect.

Last, I have huge hopes for the web. There are incredibly awesome advances being made in the range of peripherals, devices, capabilities the web supports. The web can do so much more. We're barely beginning to use the cutting edge ServiceWorkers, barely beginning to use Custom Elements ("WebComponenets"), and these aren't even that new any more. These are fundamentally revolutionary technologies. Things like File System Access just came back on the scene after over a decade of going nowhere. Secondary screen working group is tying together multiple systems in interesting ways. There's a lot of high-tower shit, in WebAssembly (especially when Interface Bindings starts to allow real interop with JS), in TypeScript, but to me, I think rather than just building up up up there's some very real re-assessments we ought to be making about how and what we build. Trying to make self-documenting machines, trying to make computing visible, these aren't concerns of industrial computing, but they are socially invaluable advances that have been somewhat on hold in the age of Pax React-us, and we're well over half a decade in & while there's endless areas to learn about, improve, get better at in this highly industrialized toolset, I want to think there are some slumbering appetites, some desires to re-assess. I'm a bit afraid/scared of WebAssembly being a huge tower-of-babel time-sink/re-industrializing-focus that distracts from the need for a new vision quest, but I have hope too, I see the yearning. Albeit often expressed in lo-fi counter-culture, which to me is a distraction & avoidance, rather than the socially empowering act that has been a quiet part of the web's promise[5].

So I have a lot of tech's that seem promising to me. I want to just leave off somewhat with where I started, which is about communities and winners. Whatever happens, for it to go gangbusters, it needs to be accessible. It needs to be participatory, allow a rife ecosystem to grow up & flourish around it. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, these examples each spun up huge waves of innovation around them. They pass the Tim Oreilly "Create more value than you capture" test, which is core to the tech metastatizing from a specific technology into a wide social practice, into something deeply engaged with by a wide range of users, each testing & advancing various frontiers of the idea, of the tech. Tech that can't seed & keep vital it's ecosystem ossifies & becomes boring. Tech that can grow a healthy community of adept, knowledgable, driving practitioners has a chance of gaining the social collaboration, social presence, to matter & become a new pivot, has the chance to leave a real mark. Each of the techs I've mentioned struggles with an industrial vs social good problem, struggles to become free enough, to matter enough to become interesting again, but I think we're in a much better place than we've ever been to take any one of these- diy clouds, ubicomp, flow-based systems, the web- to the stars.

[1] https://github.com/kcp-dev/kcp

[2] https://staceyoniot.com/project-chip-becomes-matter/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123944

[3] https://webthings.io/

[4] https://nodered.org/

[5] https://webdevlaw.uk/2021/01/30/why-generation-x-will-save-t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27083699