Why clouds should be more like operating systems¶
Let's say you are running multiple different Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which contain your applications, libraries, data and configuration settings on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and you are using Amazon's S3 for storage. Don't think running everything in the cloud will abstract away potential management problems. You'll still have a system administration headache until you script something or update your AMIs with your new software and application code.
A better - and obvious - answer would be if you could have all of your images, code and applications available in a dashboard where you could simply update everything on the fly.
An even better answer would be to not have to perform any system administration functions at all. Currently, the only way to make that happen with Amazon is through third-party tools like 3Tera and RightScale.