This primer is intended to be a map. There is no recommended order for reading this primer. Even after narrowing down the scope from “Cloud” to “hyperscale public cloud infrastructure (ex-China)”, this work covers a lot of ground and, in certain areas, gets deep into the weeds — depending on the reader, there are undoubtedly sections that may prove entirely uninteresting. It is my intention, therefore, that the reader be able to quickly evaluate which sections of this primer might be interesting, if there any at all. To that end, I’ve mapped out the contents of this primer ...

Here’s everything in this work in as a compressed of a form as I can manage and you can decide what’s worth reading. Full screen recommended.

... in such a way that the reader can browse through both the main theses and the point-by-point breakdown of each of the sections without having to read the entire primer.

The nested hierarchical view (sections ⊇ subsections ⊇ heads ⊇ subheadings) of the primer looks like this:

<aside> ✴️ Nested Hierarchical View of Primer:

Planetary-Scale Computation: An industry primer on the hyperscale CSP oligopoly (AWS/Azure/GCP)

README
- what this is (📍you are here!!!)
- what this is not
- the good, the bad, and the interesting
- why i made this
- meditations on the cloud
Scope
- Defining the Cloud
- Service Models vs Deployment Models

Let’s Get Physical, (Cyber)Physical!: Flows of Atoms, Flows of Electrons

On “the” “Cloud”; There is no Cloud; Servers are Eating the World
Mental Models of the Cloud and You
A Materialist Ontology of the Cloud
- Macro: Planetary Scale
- Meso: Datacenter Scale
- Micro: Atomic Scale

A Cloudy History: Four Histories of Cloud Computing

A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the marketing term)
A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the idea)
A Brief History of Cloud Computing (the business model)
A Brief History of Cloud Computing (as we know it today)

Primer on the Economics of Cloud Computing

The perfect business model doesn’t exi—
Techne: Cloud economics in theory
- Why firms buy cloud services: Individual supply-demand
- Why firms sell cloud services: Aggregate supply-demand
Metis: Cloud economics in practice
- The Cost of a Cloud
- Cloudy Revenue Streams; Cloudy Profit Pools

Three-Body: Competitive Dynamics in the Hyperscale Oligopoly

Complete Information and Stable Configurations in the Three Body Problem
Initial Positions and Laws of [Competitive] Motion
- Initial Positions: Where are the Three Bodies?
- Initial Positions and Laws of Motion: Why Three Bodies?
- Laws of [Competitive] Motion: The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits
Mass and the Law of [Economic] Gravitation
- Mass: The Cloud is a variable-mass system
- Law of [Economic] Gravity: Supply and Demand
  - Compute Demand
  - Supply: Capex/Capacity Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.)
Velocity and the n-body problem
- The n-body problem: An Allegory for the Cloud
- The n-body problem: The Cloud’s Food Chain and Trillion Dollar Frenemies
  - The Cloud’s Food Web
  - Public Cloud Value Matrix
  - Trillion Dollar Frenemies
- Velocity and Vertical Integration in the Hyperscale Cloud
  - Feels Like We Only Integrate Backwards
  - Shingeki no Hyperscaler: Keep Integrating Forward

[WIP] The Telos of Planetary-Scale Computation: Ongoing and Future Developments

</aside>

It bears repeating that this primer is meant as a map. Somewhere between 100 to 200 references to both external links and other pages within my Notion workspace are referenced throughout this primer — an ethos of exploration rather than completion and consumption is recommended.

The main section of this primer, “Three-Body: Competitive Dynamics in the Hyperscale Oligopoly” covers: the strategic positioning of the hyperscalers relative to the rest of the players in the Cloud ecosystem, various frames for understanding overall industry trends in Cloud and cloud infrastructure, demand and supply/capacity drivers for compute resources, an industry value chain decomposition of the public cloud, what “industry clouds” are, and hyperscaler vertical integration. This industry analysis primarily hinges upon two elements: