What would once be a metal machine onto which you load executable code has become a thing that you can run virtually. Containers, serverless lambdas, dynamic language runtimes. Everything becomes faster, more fungible (a zeitgeist word but I mean it in the old way) and easier to work with.
We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display.
What’s new and ongoing is that software is eating itself. Another comment here expresses this as code becoming a data structure but that’s too pure for me. The practical improvements we’ll see don’t need to go that far and won’t be as zealous but we’ll reap the same rewards.
I’m personally looking forward to the next generations of infrastructure as code, where all the useful parts are factored out of the current monolithic ecosystems and become as composable as actual code is. It feels like, to draw an analogy with version control systems, we are at that 2005 boundary of CVS to SVN, and git is still around the corner.