If you look closely at the history of technology infrastructure, you’ll notice a consistent pattern: abstraction.
Abstraction simply means hiding the complex parts in order to simplify the user’s experience. For example you don’t need to know how a combustion engine works just to drive to the supermarket. You just press the pedal and go. In the tech world, this trend is happening fast, and if we look at the history, we can actually make some solid predictions about the future.
To understand where we are going, we have to look at how we got here.
1. Physical Servers (The Iron Age of Tech)
Computing devices that are based on mechanical/analog tools have been used for thousands of years, like the abacus.
It took two World Wars, countless innovations, and decades of research to finally produce the first commercial digital computer named “Ferranti Mark 1” in the early 1950’s, computers/physical servers fundamentally changed the way all organizations operate, but naturally it was not immediately universally adopted, paper dominated many industries up until the early 1990’s
But eventually servers dominated
The rule was: one application, one OS, one physical server
While “moore’s law” made computers much faster and gave them more memory, this old way was very inefficient. You ended up with these powerful beasts of machines running only one thing, often using just 10% of their power. The rest of the resources were just sitting there, doing nothing. It was a huge waste of money and space.
2. Virtualization Naturally, engineers hated this waste, so they found a fix. This led to Virtualization.
It started as research in universities but soon became the standard everywhere. Virtualization let us use software to split one physical server into many “Virtual Machines” (VMs). Suddenly, one physical box could do the work of ten servers.
This was a huge deal. It slashed the costs for companies because they didn’t need to buy as much hardware, and it made managing everything much smoother. If a server broke, you could just move the VM to another one.
3. Containers & Microservices But as time went on, even VMs started to feel too heavy. The problem was that every VM needed its own full operating system (Guest OS). That takes up a lot of storage and RAM.
Also, developers had this problem where code would work on their laptop but break on the server. This issue led to Containers.
Containers are like lightweight VMs that share the OS. They only hold the tiny bits needed for the app to run. This allowed the industry to move to “microservices.” Instead of building an app as one giant, scary block of code (a monolith), developers began breaking apps into small, independent parts. If one part breaks, the whole app doesn’t crash. It made fixing things so much easier.
4. Serverless (The Invisible Infrastructure) The trend continued. We stopped worrying about the server, then the OS, and now, with Function-as-a-Service, we don’t even worry about the environment.
With functions, you just write a specific piece of logic—like “resize this image”—and the cloud runs it only when needed. You don’t pay for a server sitting idle at 3 AM. You only pay for the milliseconds the code is running. The infrastructure is basically invisible now, you just focus on the code.
The Future:
I predict three major shifts for the near future:
1. Business-as-a-Service (BaaS) We are moving toward a future where non-technical users can spin up an entire organization as easily as we currently spin up a server. Imagine an interface where you define the purpose of your business, and the system automatically provisions the applications (CRM, Sales, ERP) and the AI agents required to run them. The “tech stack” will become a utility, as simple as electricity.
2. Natural Language is the New Compiler As abstraction continues, “coding” as we know it will disappear for 90% of people. We moved from Machine Code -> Assembly -> Python. The final layer is Human Language. In the future, you won’t need to learn syntax. You will simply describe what you want in English (or your native language), and AI agents will write and deploy the infrastructure for you.
3. Disposable Software Today, we build software like monuments—meant to last for years. But as creating software becomes instant and free (thanks to BaaS and AI), we will see the rise of Disposable Software. We will spin up a custom app for a specific 3-day conference or a weekend project, use it, and then discard it.
Conclusion
The history of technology is the history of making the “how” invisible so we can focus on the “why.” We are rapidly approaching a time where the barrier to entry for building a digital business is zero. The technology of tomorrow won’t just be faster; it will be invisible.
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