

Death of the Pure IaaS Cloud: The impact on customers - cloudsigma
http://www.cloudsigma.com/en/blog/2011/03/18/18-pure-iaas-cloud-death-part-1

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miha123
People asked: "what do you mean by "pure" IaaS?" It is a legitimate question,
as the bare iron needs an operating system, some utilities, in order to be
usable. In reality "pure IaaS" is the absolute minimum PaaS required to set up
a server or a cloud infrastructure.

How do we define the "minimum" PaaS? Some IaaS providers take themselves the
decision -take it or leave it - on behalf of the customers. Very few IaaS
providers, like CloudSigma, are offering customers the freedom to choose what
they need, what it works for them, what they like.

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jclouds-fan
Worth mentioning, another strategy for customers is to use an abstraction
layer. Good ones include jclouds and libcloud. Still take the point about
focus/quality.

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wmf
What would be great is an auth and billing abstraction layer so that a
customer could buy services from multiple providers on the same account.

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cloudsigma
Yes, all cloud brokerage attempts have so far stuck to the resources and
avoided trying to do any unified billing. Its really tough to accomplish.

Can you think of other areas where competing services have common open
billing? Great for sure but difficult commercially. Especially when you start
bringing in credit risk and other non-technical factors.

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wmf
I agree that this is difficult. I wasn't really thinking about competing
providers though; more like complementary. Like getting IaaS from one company,
CDN from another, DNS from another, etc. One could imagine a federation of
pure-play service providers that might be able to compete against the more
integrated cloud juggernauts while each company focused on one thing.

