As a counterpoint, I'd like to say that it makes a lot of sense to retain some level of control of servers you are renting. You want to avoid your cloud becoming a botnet cloud (what would that be, a virus cloud? O.o).<p>If you have your own admins keeping things up to date and polished, it removes (1) some grief from the customer and (2) allows you to rest more comfortably knowing your admin (theoretically) knows what he's doing.<p>The author points out that for conventional electric devices, there is no input from the electric company. True. But, if one puts in an industrial facility, the electric company starts caring, because the loads can not be simply ignored (c.f. inductive/reactive loads). That has analogies to the cloud.<p>There are decided advantages for the customer to have full control, there are decided advantages for the vendor to have full control.
There are people moving towards an open source implementation of high scalability cloud services. For example, the OpenStack project at <a href="http://www.openstack.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.openstack.org</a>.<p>The main pieces were contributed by Rackspace and NASA, but dozens of other contributors are involved in the project now.<p>Full disclosure: I work at Rackspace.
The post (marketing article) says nothing and doesn't identify what vendor they are trashing. As far as I know my 'IaaS' vendor doesn't retain root access. The article makes almost no sense, it starts be trashing iaas, then suggests paas, with out attempting to explain any difference between a 'platform' and 'infrastructure'.<p>The only thing missing from the article is an affiliate code on the enstratus link. Then it would be fully clear who wrote it and why. Has anyone not selling something ever uttered the phrase 'deploy best of breed solutions'? I think not.<p>If my current iaas vendor retains root access then I certainly don't want a more 'managed' solution.