While people may be painting Amazon in a bad light here, the business-level risk of wholly committing to a single infrastructure provider (cloud or otherwise, across multiple 'availability zones' or data centers or countries or continents, or otherwise) is real. There is a clear need for many service authors to work with disparate infrastructure in a cloud provider and platform abstracted manner, and arguably no solid tools for doing it right now.
What will the future look like? I believe that a standard, git-like command line tool for infrastructure, sort of a 'brandless ec2' or 'P-abstracted IaaS' version of heroku, will replace all of the current-era providers with a free market for infrastructure based on transparency, real uptime and performance analysis and incident observations by multiple third parties with cryptographic reputation management. Two angles converging on that at http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts and http://ifex-project.org/
Kind of. At a glance, it's new, commercial and they gloss over the complexities... therefore I'm skeptical it really works as well as they say it does, and is leaning toward my 'untrustworthy as a long term platform' basket. Though they may have great tools, I believe history shows us that open source is the real way to resolve these very reasonable types of architectural concerns.
RightScale's single-cloud offering doesn't seem that great, I'd be really worried about them having multi-cloud support.
I have some ideas around a project for "cloud abstraction" - kind of PaaS-as-a-service (we have to go deeeeeper) - but only some early thoughts right now.
What will the future look like? I believe that a standard, git-like command line tool for infrastructure, sort of a 'brandless ec2' or 'P-abstracted IaaS' version of heroku, will replace all of the current-era providers with a free market for infrastructure based on transparency, real uptime and performance analysis and incident observations by multiple third parties with cryptographic reputation management. Two angles converging on that at http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts and http://ifex-project.org/