One of the ideas being kicked around inside the bit of Pivotal that works on Cloud Foundry, back when i was there, was the need for some abstraction that lets y

One of the ideas being kicked around inside the bit of Pivotal that works on Cloud Foundry, back when i was there, was the need for some abstraction that lets you cleanly separate those things. You want your sysadmin/SRE/cloud provider/platform team to be able to do all the hardware/unix/networking stuff, and then people who know the managed software really well to be able to look after them, without having to worry about the rest. Cloud Foundry (and things like it) does a reasonable job of separating those things for "applications", ie web apps, pretty well, but didn't have an equivalent for data services. Nobody was quite sure what it should look like. I suppose part of Kubernetes's success has been that it looks like a solution to this. I'm not sure how well it really works, though. If something like this worked, it would technically enable a marketplace model, where AWS or GCP do their efficient hardware thing, then the software experts provide a value-added service on top of that. What we would then be missing is a way to economically enable that model, where it doesn't make sense for AWS etc to just provide their own version of the service and capture all the profit.