[closeparen]

>I'd really like to see containers services like Joyent's take off.

Interesting. I'd like to see a return to owning/renting whole machines and running containers on them directly (as several major tech companies do). A lot of the value proposition for the cloud service providers is a multi-host hypervisor that's really easy to get started with (compared to buying vSphere). If it becomes really easy to deploy your own instance of an open-source container scheduler across your own boxes, we can return to cost-competitive commodity boxes instead of overpaying for AWS.

[Timothycquinn]

Agreed, private cloud systems that leverage OS level virtualization like Joyent's solution is completely production ready from a software perspective. IMO, the biggest challenge past getting CTO approval is finding production 24/7 support for the complete stack.

For SMB private clouds, its a no-brainer; I just buy a FreeNAS or TrueNAS box (FreeBSD based) from iXSystems and have them customize the box for extra ram and CPU. You get ZFS, DTrace and a wicked NAS, OS level virtualization with jails and even linux binary support if required. I've done this successfully in production and could not be happier.

Note: I don't work for iXSystems but I do love their products and services.