From Renting Machines by the Hour to Renting Capabilities by the MSeconds • Dhaval Nagar • GOTO 2025

A 19-year veteran developer traces the evolution of cloud compute infrastructure over the last decade, from manually provisioning EC2 instances billed by the hour to serverless functions billed by the millisecond. The talk covers three eras: 2015–2017 (Lambda GA, S3 triggers, early serverless primitives), 2018–2021 (serverless frameworks like Serverless Framework and SST, rise of Vercel and Netlify, APIs replacing infrastructure), and 2022–2025 (LLM/AI APIs, vector databases, edge functions, Cloudflare Workers). The core thesis is a shift from paying for infrastructure uptime to paying for consumed value, and from engineers who manage infrastructure to engineers who eliminate it by composing focused API-driven services.