I think there's a risk here but I'm not sure it goes as far as you suggest. There are still plenty of entities, particularly larger ones, that buy their own metal because at some scales it becomes far cheaper to run in a COLO (at least acc to near monthly articles posted on HN). I'd therefore put the risk that only big vendors will be able to buy hardware as low. That said, as ARM or custom chips gain market share within cloud providers, there's a risk that x86 or standard suppliers will struggle, but AMD/Intel see this too and surely one or both will adapt.
On skills I think there's a small risk of people not knowing how to manage/set up their own racks, but doing a passable job there isn't that hard. On general sys-admin stuff, cloud infrastructure seems to have parallels to hardware infrastructure, so it shouldn't be completely unfamiliar to set up a hardware router/network/linux server. There are definitely skills and details missing (remote admin tools for hardware maybe), but this doesn't seem like a big gap to bridge if $$$ is on the line?
If those entities would be any risk, they would already be bought.
Or they will be long gone due to google/aws/microsoft price dumping. In meanwhile, the openly accessible technology / know-how will be gone or hired by them and there will be no one left. Just look around, how many people you know that are capable of handling on-premise server? What about farm of servers without using any of google/aws/microsoft technology?
This just isn't something new.
It is just another case of "historia magistra vitae". We had this, 30-40 years back, we had centralized environment (have you heard about mainframes before?), due to huge price pumping the decentralized environment came in (personal computers, internet, on premise servers, storage, ...). IT needed almost 20 years to get out of the hooks of corporations and now we are all diving in into the latest "cool" thing - centralization, now backed up by advertising revenues and shady practices like not showing your company on google search.
Let me show you my point and where it is going, lets do a tiny experiment - use your router/firewall/whatever you are fond of and block the following ASNs:
Now try to surf the internet. Casual style. As nothing happened.
Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia) will still work from search engines. Duckduckgo not (shame on you). As any other you know. "The internet" as you know it will stop to exist for you. You know what you have blocked with those ASNs? Only 3 companies. Google. Amazon. Microsoft.
For complete experience you can also throw in AS714,AS6185,AS2709 and AS63293,AS54115,AS32934 (Apple, Facebook), but those two are not really relevant.
Maybe this will be eye opening how much we have f* up the internet, something that should survive 3rd world war is now mostly in the hands of 3 companies. Now imagine they pull the switch.
> Maybe this will be eye opening how much we have f up the internet, something that should survive 3rd world war is now mostly in the hands of 3 companies. Now imagine they pull the switch.*
I see people frequently quoting the bit about how the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war. But that quote was about packet switching. I.e. layer 2/3. Not layer 7. Application layer is, as you nicely demonstrate, very centralized, and was never immune to nuclear war.
Admittedly I know few, but not zero. That said they’re all relatively older and have been in the business for a while. I used to manage a team with 4 racks, ~40 machines at a COLO. When we hired for new people, it was usually older folks who had the experience necessary. Maybe you’re right and I agree the concentration is disturbing.
My only response is that when I look at bigger orgs and places like Fortune 500 cos I still see/hear about home built server farms, so those people must be out there. I think maybe we get blinded in startup/SV land and only see people using cloud infrastructure but miss a huge, silent mass of people.
Depending on the nature of the business it can be cheaper to run own servers even for smaller companies. I see that in Norway quite a few places see that and the pool of qualified people to run them is not small.
On skills I think there's a small risk of people not knowing how to manage/set up their own racks, but doing a passable job there isn't that hard. On general sys-admin stuff, cloud infrastructure seems to have parallels to hardware infrastructure, so it shouldn't be completely unfamiliar to set up a hardware router/network/linux server. There are definitely skills and details missing (remote admin tools for hardware maybe), but this doesn't seem like a big gap to bridge if $$$ is on the line?