IMO the big winners in this space will be the ones that provide feature parity in self-hosted runtimes (meant for dev and testing) in addition to consumption based entry level plans.
If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non-revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn something.
I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs low.
If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non-revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn something.
I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs low.