I'd like to comment on some of questions you pose, and your points.
"Will AWS build its own OS and ditch Linux?" -- let me answer a question with another question - do you see new kernels built each day? Linux had about 30M LOC at the beginning of 2020, with about 4k contributors each year. It's being developed since early 1990s. Do you think Amazon, or anybody else, are gonna be able to pull that off, and build a proprietary kernel (which still has to adhere to POSIX standards), in say less than 10-20 years? The main question here is - why they would even do that? What's wrong with Linux from their perspective?
"Nearly all the cloud providers have an academia and offer certification so that you can demonstrate that you can use their services." -- well, supply meets demand. In my experience, these certificates only bring money to the issuers and don't reflect real knowledge in a slightest bit.
Also, what is Linux architect? What is Cloud architect? Linux and Cloud are like apples and oranges; and then I cannot even remotely imagine what a Linux architect is supposed to do. Most probably she doesn't architect Linux itself. Probably it's some business application architecture. Why call her Linux architect, how does the fundamental architecture problems tie to OS in generic sense? Same with Cloud architect, sure, using AWS or GCP or whatever has its quirks. But if one can only do something in the cloud, I doubt one understands how the cloud works.
"I see less useful to know Linux in a cloud first era" -- it's just, the complexity is being buried under abstractions. The fact that abstraction hides implementation details from you doesn't mean that the implementation details are not gonna bite you. I saw far too many people that, when asked "How would you plan capacity for your service?" in a system design interview, would say "I'd check this tickbox in AWS. It would do everything automatically for me". And that works... except when it doesn't, and then you're left completely clueless without understanding the underlying abstractions.
I'm really frustrated by the fact that people see no benefits in knowing how the Big Magic Black Box works anymore. That just means you can't operate that Black Box, and eventually the knowledge would fade away. And this is, at least to me, a bad thing.
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Thanks for this long thoughtful comment, this blog post is to talk about it, and think about it... I want Linux to win... I don't want us to just rely too much on the abstractions of vendors...
Unfortunately, one way or another, the moment your product starts to rely on a certain cloud provider, you're locked-in. If you're using multiple clouds, well, you're locked in multiple vendors. The only way out of it is to use self-built systems on self-owned hardware in a self-built datacenter. Starting from there, everything depends on the money you're able to spend on h/w and engineers, and thus on your scale. Then, take one step backward at a time until you reach the point when you can afford it. Rent a datacenter, rent hardware, rent EC2 instances/generic compute, and if you can't afford that - rent managed services.
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I'd like to comment on some of questions you pose, and your points.
"Will AWS build its own OS and ditch Linux?" -- let me answer a question with another question - do you see new kernels built each day? Linux had about 30M LOC at the beginning of 2020, with about 4k contributors each year. It's being developed since early 1990s. Do you think Amazon, or anybody else, are gonna be able to pull that off, and build a proprietary kernel (which still has to adhere to POSIX standards), in say less than 10-20 years? The main question here is - why they would even do that? What's wrong with Linux from their perspective?
"Nearly all the cloud providers have an academia and offer certification so that you can demonstrate that you can use their services." -- well, supply meets demand. In my experience, these certificates only bring money to the issuers and don't reflect real knowledge in a slightest bit.
Also, what is Linux architect? What is Cloud architect? Linux and Cloud are like apples and oranges; and then I cannot even remotely imagine what a Linux architect is supposed to do. Most probably she doesn't architect Linux itself. Probably it's some business application architecture. Why call her Linux architect, how does the fundamental architecture problems tie to OS in generic sense? Same with Cloud architect, sure, using AWS or GCP or whatever has its quirks. But if one can only do something in the cloud, I doubt one understands how the cloud works.
"I see less useful to know Linux in a cloud first era" -- it's just, the complexity is being buried under abstractions. The fact that abstraction hides implementation details from you doesn't mean that the implementation details are not gonna bite you. I saw far too many people that, when asked "How would you plan capacity for your service?" in a system design interview, would say "I'd check this tickbox in AWS. It would do everything automatically for me". And that works... except when it doesn't, and then you're left completely clueless without understanding the underlying abstractions.
I'm really frustrated by the fact that people see no benefits in knowing how the Big Magic Black Box works anymore. That just means you can't operate that Black Box, and eventually the knowledge would fade away. And this is, at least to me, a bad thing.
Thanks for this long thoughtful comment, this blog post is to talk about it, and think about it... I want Linux to win... I don't want us to just rely too much on the abstractions of vendors...
Unfortunately, one way or another, the moment your product starts to rely on a certain cloud provider, you're locked-in. If you're using multiple clouds, well, you're locked in multiple vendors. The only way out of it is to use self-built systems on self-owned hardware in a self-built datacenter. Starting from there, everything depends on the money you're able to spend on h/w and engineers, and thus on your scale. Then, take one step backward at a time until you reach the point when you can afford it. Rent a datacenter, rent hardware, rent EC2 instances/generic compute, and if you can't afford that - rent managed services.