Perhaps this has more to do with goals and focus than cost/efficiency. In many tech companies the scarcest resource is man-hours for development/maintenance.
The order of complexity for public cloud/multi-tenant is much higher than for private/single-tenant, especially given the recent onslaught of CPU vulnerabilities.
Still a big loss. I imagine it must feel like a defeat, especially to Bryan, given the corporate culture at Joyent. Open sourcing triton is great, but it still needs hosting for people to use it. Amazon/Google/Microsoft could certainly cut costs if they leveraged bare metal so who knows.
The main problem with cucumber / GWD is that in most implementations it serves as an opaque abstraction layer which is an incomplete/incorrect model abstraction of the system itself.
Been doing a lot of API testing recently with karate dsl and writing cucumber tests that include json expressions with some syntactical sugar for validation. The tests serve as a specification for the system which is actually quite a bit more precise than even swagger since you can even go back in time and compare the deltas on request/response between test executions to troubleshoot regressions.
Agree that GWT can't help business understand the inherently complexity of a state machine, but individual tests can be used effectively to model state transitions, especially at the api level.
Criticisms not entirely fair. Making specific investment recommendations depend on your goals. The job of a good book is to teach you principles, not to pre-digest your decisions for you.