Not sure why the author complaining about VM & cloud ? You can get real machines through APIs not from Amazon, but you can from other providers like: Rackspace

Not sure why the author complaining about VM & cloud ? You can get real machines through APIs not from Amazon, but you can from other providers like: Rackspace and IBM/Softlayer (and others). He even links to Bryan Cantrill, so pretty sure Joyent can deliver containers (even Docker ?) on baremetal if you want them.