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/
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/