People forget AWS is 20 years old. When I routinely remind people of that fact they often remark (incredulously) with "WHAT? Really?" When I think about it the entire paradigm of "regions" itself seems completely antiquated in the grand scheme of things. AWS has made a few moves on this but in the end you're largely still tied to this fundamental regional concept in terms of control planes, etc and you incur the ridiculousness that is VPCs, wild billing and availability issues, all kinds of hacks, stacks, and effort all over the place to have multiple regions/AZs, etc.
I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends.
When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.
I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends.
When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.