rock333 wrote: At the IaaS Cloud layer virtualisation is going to be essential to allow the self service attributes, all painful and slow to do with physical hardware. Moving up the stack to PaaS and SaaS the use of virtualisation may, as you say, be less required if you put lots of smarts into your software. A lot of software does not have those smarts and by utalising virtualisation of the layers below can manipulate existing software architectures to have more cloudy attributes through automation (eg run load balancers and deploy more servers automagically). Over time, as new investment in software at...