Missing in the Cloud: package managment
The Cloud is missing the paradigms from the OS world. We need some standardization to continue to progress.
It seems like all of the existing Cloud offerings are missing some kind of package manager system. AMIs require updating like VMs, which can introduce downtime and other complexity.
I dare say that a standard needs to be introduced--or at least a quasi-standard like we see for Linux with Yum, RPM and Synaptic (essentially flavors of the same ideal.)
Since Amazon doesn't currently offer this feature, I wonder what vendor will step in to fill this void. So far all the Cloud app guys have taken different approaches which will certainly introduce some additional complexity related to portability (which also needs to be standardized.)
One of the things I've been noticing is that many of the technical issues related to the Cloud are things that have to become standardized (if not actual standards) in order for adoption to increase. While this is good for Cloud consumers, it will probably subsume much of the work companies have done around differentiated offerings.
It makes me think that there will be a lot of consolidation or dead pool Cloud companies as soon as these standards are established. Any comments or thoughts are welcome.