What *I* got excited about with cloud (circa 2009) was standard APIs for bootstrap, configuration, and command/control.  The promise (to me) was that eventually we could commoditize the *aaS layers, either remote or on-prem, and focus on ownership of whatever ran our cause/business/org.  I cheered the efforts by VMWare to standardize an open API, etc.  But... something else happened.  We decided we didn't need to own anything at all, ceding agency in our systems to cloud. RIP #EzraZygmuntowicz