At this year’s Cloud Connect, Werner Vogels predicted a future in which everything-as-a-service is the norm. While enterprise IT often equates virtual machines with the cloud, the reality is that virtual machines are only one of dozens of services Amazon offers. Its competitors aren’t far behind: companies like Google offer a horde of APIs, and even more traditional memory/compute/storage providers like Joyent are adding turnkey products for large storage.
In the end, nobody wants to see the sausage being made. Recent announcements by folks like VMWare, public provider acquisitions of PaaS products, competing private stacks like Openstack and Cloud.com, and private cloud tools that run higher up the stack remind us of one thing above all else: herding your boxen is a distraction from the business of building software and deploying applications.
I tried to argue this point at Cloud Connect, in a presentation entitled The Move to Turnkey Computing. Here it is on Slideshare, as a PDF with speakers’ notes.