Do we need yet another abstraction layer?

Let’s briefly summarize what we have seen so far. A platform puts a bracket around, and a layer of abstraction on top of, your existing infrastructure and environments. The platform enhances it with further capabilities so that your development teams can utilize it in an automated, self-serving way.

From a technical perspective, this represents the next layer of abstraction. Therefore, it is only right to discuss this new fabric we put on top. Going from the bottom to the top, we see the bare metal, followed by the hypervisor for virtualization; this is topped by cloud providers. Some might include containers, Kubernetes, or serverless components – and now, we will add our platform. These are at least four layers, each promising to make the layer underneath simpler and glued together by a hard-to-be-defined meta-level of scripts, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), cloud libraries, and automation. So, do we really need this yet another...