Today’s cloud service providers come from two ends of a spectrum: On one side are IaaS providers like Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Terramark. They sell CPU cycles and Hard disk space.
The other camp is the SaaS ones: Salesforce, Webex, Google Apps and the like. They sell a fully developed application hosted somewhere out there.
However, the gap between these two is getting narrower by the day: Microsoft is working hard to add more added-value services to Azure. Amazon is opening up its CloudWatch service to become a business intelligent dashboard tool. Salesforce is building Database.com and buys Heroku. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon said the same thing in the Structure conference.
It seems that Cloud computing is maturing up and moving to become more seamless. This is a reaction to the push from the users. Until now, most of hosted-on-the-premise applications were simply put on those cloud boxes to satisfy the “cloud initiatives” of their companies. On their way, they would gain some availability and reliability but there was still a lot that could be achieved by designing a system truly for the cloud.
PaaS providers like dotCloud are providing some added value on top of the basic CPU cycles and VMWare is trying to sell its vSphere 5 as the OS for the cloud. However, the main move is going to be to a Component As A Service (CaaS) ecosystem where applications will be reduced more and more to their core functionalities and leave the rest to the cloud providers.
These will be the systems that help programs become systems in a short period of time. They will make developers stars by letting them focusing on supporting the business, handling its growth while reducing the time to market short.