Please forgive me for being naive, but isn't much of what was discussed already in place? From that I mean, our users have no idea where the physical machine is, or what it is, nor do they care. All they know is there is an ODBC connection called "IAR_Warehouse". And then even that is sort of foggy because of DNS aliases.

The argument that developers won't care where the services are isn't much better, for they all use the aliases as well.

I guess it all boils down to the fact that at SOME point, you still have to have people that deal with the machines themselves and not some abstraction. The only thing that I see the cloud initiatives doing is pushing that responsibility to another group of people.

(I would like to soften the coming criticisms. I'm working on very little sleep today and the ankle I broke 5 weeks ago is particularly sore from "working" on the fence.)