I never understood how "rise of cloud computing" could help anyone. Clouds are overpriced and useless. Only thing they did was to obscure the very existence of dedicated servers from the average person so they feel compelled to use cloud assuming there is no alternative except buying servers and installing them in their office. This was a dirty mass manipulation exercise that didn't make any good for anyone except Amazon itself. High time people stop mentioning "clouds" as enabler to anything (ESPECIALLY now since AI tools can replace basic level devops work and enable anyone run code on their $50 a month Hetzner machine no worse than they can on AWS).

Clouds are a fad. By far not the most dangerous or most harmful, but the most symptomatic fad of our generation. In educated countries - even very rich ones where people can afford absurdly overpriced clouds - no one uses them. They are US-only thing where overconfident, rich, and dumb people who can't filter through pressure of omnipresent ads, use them. Clouds are a testament of how systematic dumbing down of population and brain-erasing, omnipresent marketing power can steer crowds to make absurd decisions and systematically overpay for nothing believing they are blessed with it.