Barriers to entry
Before AWS was popular, you could still rent servers from hosting companies and set the server up yourself. You'd have to set up IPTables, user access via SSH, and update the OS packages before your bastion server was ready. Security groups, and AMI have replaced the need to tinker with those tools anymore.
If your application needed a database you had to set up that too. Building the database from the source, setting up logical replication and high availability, and configuring database access based on IP and roles. Amazon RDS packages all of this for you today.
Many more features that we take for granted in AWS or GCP or the MS Cloud created a barrier to entry into starting up. Bringing the architecture to life is much easier today.
Speaking of barriers, artwork is a barrier for an indie game developer that likes to work on small games. You can write code, but few are gifted at the arts. Midjourney is changing this. Check out FlipBuzz, a simple app written in Flutter by a frontend engineer at Rocketlane. The code was written over a weekend and the art was generated in seconds.
It's a simple game where you flip two cards and try to match the same ones. It's pretty fun too. AI is reducing the barrier for entry into areas that we're still discovering everyday. You can tell when some of the icons and art out there are generated by AI (hello 6 fingered person), but that gap will reduce with time.
While you're waiting for AI to get better at that, please download and play FlipBuzz.
