jasona.work (9/16/2013)
...When people say "cloud" most automatically think of the big commercial offerings (Azure, Amazon, etc.) But it doesn't have to be. It can be a couple virtualization hosts living in your server room.
Absolutely.
However the "cloud" should be divorcing the admin from the end user work. I use VMs as well, but I have to manage them, patch them, etc. It doesn't feel much like a cloud where I can request a new VM that's patched and ready to go with Winxxx and SQLXxx. Some of that may be me, but I suspect I'd have to admin this stuff somewhere.
I wish there were good tools to help with this. It certainly makes me consider using Azure for more stuff.