How have other companies attempted to replicate the Heroku developer experience by abstracting away some of the manual configuration for developers?

Exactly. It wasn't really that long ago in the grand scheme of things that everybody had a room full of servers in their office. Those are now commoditized. You don't really need to maintain your own server. The only reason to do it is if you're at such a scale that the trade-off between paying full-time people to maintain your server racks dips below the markup that you're paying to a cloud hosting company, or if you have to be at such a high scale or you have really, really edge case requirements. The vast majority of companies just aren't there. So yeah, use the commoditized thing. Let's spin up GCP or Azure or AWS and let all of that infra go away.

If that's the case, then we can build layers on top of it, because everybody was going to use it anyway and take away your need to have to configure that stuff. Kubernetes is kind of like that. You build companies on top of Kubernetes, and then people don't even need to know that they're using containers or Kubernetes or any of that stuff. They just say, “Well, I need a server.” In Netlify's case, we saw that for websites so much of that stack has been completely commoditized. We know we need a CDN. We know we need good DNS. We know we need an efficient way to deliver things. We know we need the ability to recover if something goes wrong. All those things are going to be true. So you can build it yourself or you can pay a little bit of money to Netlify, and in most cases, you'll pay significantly less to Netlify than you would pay to a developer on your staff to solve that same problem.