The foundation of this is thirty years old:

Mark Andreesen founded a company to do what Amazon did: Loudcloud. This was cloud computing, BEFORE AWS was public. Loudcloud was founded in the nineties; AWS opened its APIs in 2006.

Loudcloud failed and became Opsware. Opsware was server automation.

Its competitor was Bladelogic.

Luke Kanies, from BladeLogic, founded Puppet. Puppet was open source, and steamrollered over nearly every installation of BladeLogic and Opsware in existence, because you can’t beat free.

Folks from BladeLogic migrated to jobs at DCOS.

DCOS was steamrollered by Kubernetes, the same way Puppet steamrollered BladeLogic.

The author of the piece predicts that open weight models will steamroller everything next.

I fear he’s right.

I worked for Opsware and BladeLogic.

I watched it happen in real time.

Financially, Andreesen’s wealth stems from Opsware. He is known for Mosaic, but Opsware put him on the map, financially. HP bought them.

If one wants to follow in Andreesen’s footsteps, study how he did it at Opsware.

Conveniently, there is a book.

“The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”