Why Modern Cloud Infrastructure for Developers Is Broken

Most developers treat the cloud like a necessary evil. We hold our noses, pay the egress tax, and spend half our time fighting abstractions that were designed for a world of spinning hard drives and monolithic data centers. If you’ve ever felt like your cloud provider is actively working against your ability to just run code, you aren't crazy. The problem isn't your architecture; it’s that the fundamental building blocks of today’s cloud are the wrong shape.

I’m building a new cloud because the current ones are fundamentally broken. We’ve spent fifteen years trying to paper over these cracks with layers of complexity like Kubernetes, but you cannot fix a flawed foundation by adding more abstractions on top. It’s time to stop pretending that a remote block device is a substitute for local SSD performance or that nested virtualization is a sane way to manage compute.

Here is why the current cloud model is failing us:

1. The VM Resource Trap: Modern clouds tie you to rigid instance types. You buy a "VM," but you should be buying raw CPU, memory, and disk. On a real computer, you can spin up as many processes as you want. In the cloud, you’re forced into a box that limits your flexibility and forces you to manage your own isolation layers.
2. The SSD Disconnect: Remote block storage made sense when we were dealing with 10ms seek times on spinning disks. Now that we have SSDs with 20-microsecond latency, the overhead of network-attached storage is a massive performance tax. We are paying premium prices for IOPS that are artificially throttled by legacy network architectures.
3. The Egress Tax: Hyperscalers have built a walled garden where moving data out is intentionally expensive. They charge a massive premium for networking, effectively holding your data hostage to ensure you stay within their ecosystem.

This isn't just about developer frustration; it’s about the future of software. We are entering an era where agents will write more code than humans ever could. If every agent has to spend its context window figuring out how to navigate the bizarre, lumpy constraints of an AWS or GCP environment, we’ve already lost. We need a cloud infrastructure for developers that treats compute as a utility, not a bespoke, vendor-locked product.

Why does the cloud feel so slow compared to a local machine? It’s because we’ve optimized for the vendor’s ease of management rather than the developer’s ability to execute. When you move to a model where you provision raw resources rather than pre-baked, constrained VMs, the performance gains are immediate. You stop fighting the platform and start building the product.

If you’re tired of the "lipstick on a pig" approach to infrastructure, it’s time to look at how we can strip away the unnecessary layers. We need to return to the basics: fast disk, raw compute, and transparent networking. The goal isn't to build another PaaS that hides the computer from you; it’s to give you the computer back.

Try this today and share what you find in the comments. If you’re ready to move beyond the limitations of legacy providers, read our technical breakdown of cloud resource isolation next. We are finally building a cloud that actually works for the way we write software today.