[kristiandupont]

It seems to me that there is a quite profitable business case in a thin abstraction over AWS/Azure/Google App Engine (or whatever it's called now).

There are lots of services like Zeit Now and Heroku that supply a complex abstraction to the point where it feels like an entirely different product. What I would want is something that allows me to host docker images/K8s on one of the big three (I guess others as well) and lets me to use configuration as code to the extent possible, but with UI/command line/API helpers that create a uniform abstraction so that can easily switch.

[tomhoward]

This is what Cloudkick [1] was setting out to do when they were funded by YC back in early 2009. But they were acquired by Rackspace [2] less than 2 years later, the product was discontinued, and nothing seems to have filled the void ever since. Seems like that kind of service is more necessary now than ever.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudkick

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/rackspace-buys-server-mana...

[mk89]

Indeed! That's exactly the point. AWS or other cloud providers are hard to use because they are about managing a data center - that you can replicate across different regions (so, multiple data centers). That's it. People confuse that with a VPS, where you start your vm and everything works out of the box.

If you need abstractions, use Heroku and that's it, you don't have to know how DNS works, or which subnet to choose for your VMs etc.

[ris]

That's the last thing AWS wants you to be able to do, actually use the cloud like a commodity. Hence their quarterly announcements of increasingly weird and wonderful marginally "added value" services which never quite behave like anything else and where you'd have a hard time mapping the functionality onto an abstracted interface.

[ris]

Also, don't get stuck in the trap of thinking the solution to a service problem needs to be ... another service ("now you've got n+1 problems"). Such an abstraction layer would be much more effective (yet less monetizable) as a tool - c.f. the original terraform (non-Cloud).

There are already tools that attempt to do a limited form of this such as nixops, which attempts to devolve the ultimate power over someone's services to the user.