Engineering infrastructural power over software production

Abstract

Over the past two decades, vendors have moved the development, operation and maintenance of enterprise software into cloud infrastructures managed by a handful of cloud companies. Critical scholars have recognized this capacity to produce and deliver software at scale–now often referred to as software-as-a-service, or SaaS–as part of cloud companies’ growing infrastructural power. However, while prior scholarship has examined the political economic ramifications of this entanglement, it often treats scalability and infrastructural power as accomplished facts, rather than contested concepts. This article complicates these concepts by examining the emergence of SaaS at a time when neither the scalability nor the infrastructural power of cloud companies was yet stabilized. Drawing on diverse sources, it analyzes Salesforce as a case that provides insight into how incremental discursive and material efforts at consolidating its infrastructural power over software production shaped the conditions under which the deployment of scalable software services to a vast number of client organizations became possible. By foregrounding software production, this article treats scalability as a sociotechnical achievement forged alongside ongoing attempts by cloud companies to establish and defend their infrastructural power, rather than an inherent attribute of contemporary cloud infrastructures. In doing so, it contributes to critical scholarship on cloud computing by underlining the co-constitutive nature of infrastructural power and scalability while situating them as fragile–rather than firmly established and uncontested–outcomes of historical contingencies.