The text discusses the evolution of cloud service providers and their networks over time. It highlights that while private IP addresses were initially believed to be preferable for in-system communications, experience has shown otherwise. In particular, it explains how AWS's private addresses can sometimes perform worse than public addresses due to extra protection provided by software-based firewalls. The author recommends PaaS users to avoid using the private interface and instead use the public one, despite its slightly higher latency, for more consistent performance.