Does this feel like rent seeking to you? The internet is not young anymore. It feels like cloud hosting is little more than the giants allowing controlled competition as long as you rent their servers. The platforms are just extensions of the massively powerful systems they use internally.
I wonder what would happen if the open source community built a viable alternative to the cloud IaaS. Like OpenStack but not a failure :). OpenFlow has shown promise and could form the core for an open IaaS. Network virtualization is the hardest part.
> I wonder what would happen if the open source community built a viable alternative to the cloud IaaS. ... Network virtualization is the hardest part.
I would think that the hardware itself is the hardest part. Companies move to the cloud because it reduces their internal OPs team, and you can scale up and down hardware extremely easily.
I respectfully disagree. Every company I've been part of moving to the cloud already had plenty of hardware. It was ease of provisioning VM's, backups, deployment, and networking that really convinced them.
VMWare comes close to offering the same thing on premesis but Oracle is too obsessed with wringing money from it to let it reach it's full potential.
I wonder what would happen if the open source community built a viable alternative to the cloud IaaS. Like OpenStack but not a failure :). OpenFlow has shown promise and could form the core for an open IaaS. Network virtualization is the hardest part.