Cloud Computing Models -- What is the future

I was reading through the first chapter of “The Cloud at Your Service” and come to the section that was describing the different types of clouds available.

The three types that they discussed were:

1. IaaS -- Infrastructure as a service. An example is Amazon EC2. In this model you are provided with access to the bare metal of the machines. You provision the operating systems, installing the applications that you need to run on each type of machine. That way you define the virtual image that you want to run for your app servers, your database servers, etc.
2. PaaS -- Platform as a Service. This is the model of Google App Engine. You don’t provision the operating systems, but you can only use the languages that they support on the platform.
3. SaaS -- Software as a Service. This model is where you are subscribing to software that will work for you. It may or may not have the ability to extend the software.

I’m trying to decide which way would make the most sense in the future. I think if we want to utilize the systems most efficiently we may need to look at the PaaS model more. This way developers must understand that the systems that they are making will be used on other machines. But we would also need a way to run the platform locally. To enable developers to test applications in the small scale before putting them up to the cloud.

I think that if a platform was created that encouraged developers to think of problems in a more cloud friendly way, it would scale easier. However the platform would need to handle the most common reasons for performance issues. The major issue that comes up when scaling systems is accessing the database. This could be minimized if the platform allowed the code that needed the data to move to increase the locality of the time and place that the data was needed.

These are just some of my ideas that I needed to get out.