We really need completely open source stack for the applications themselves, and few enough deps that they can run and be debugged locally. Not only that, but one shouldn't need to provision a cluster and configure certs just to run some business logic that's unrelated to infrastructure.
Honestly curious, do you have examples or thoughts of what this might look like? What is the core primitive upon which you want to build that is zero config but highly scalable?
We had this in the early 2000s. It was called J2EE application servers. All external dependencies were specified in terms of interfaces. Granted a lot of them were needlessly convoluted but the premise was good.
Tbh I don't have the experience to give advice or reviews.
That said, check out Nats.io. It's basically just a messaging system but it's beautifully abstracted, horizontally scalable and runs locally from a small binary. It largely removes the need for much middleware like load balancers. They've also recently added persistence features for streams and KV stores.
It doesn't solve every problem but I do think a message system is a very good core abstraction to build other things on top of.
We really need completely open source stack for the applications themselves, and few enough deps that they can run and be debugged locally. Not only that, but one shouldn't need to provision a cluster and configure certs just to run some business logic that's unrelated to infrastructure.