The cloud space is getting more and more exciting. The valley is buzzing with cloud startups, iIt is almost impossible to go out for lunch without hearing someone on the table next to you talking about the next big cloud idea.
For people like me who grew up in the hosting industry this is super exciting time. Thus must be how the Brazilians feel in expectation of the world cup coming to their country.
The most interesting part of the cloud is the whole PaaS movement. The Heroku acquisition certainly gave a boost to the industry. Whether the $250M was a fair price or not could certainly be debated (and is debated passionately especially if wine is involved). However, the amazing growth of their customer base is undeniable.
The main value of PaaS is of course the fact that developers do not have to worry about the whole hosting layer. Developers simply include few lines of code in their app and boom the app can be accessed via a browser. The PaaS providers usually use one of the big Cloud providers (Amazon, Rackspace, MSFT) to host the app. But the user does not see (often could not care less) where and how the app is hosted.
If you know developers you know this is very compelling value prop for them . Developers love developing and dealing with server management is a nuisance they would love to paas on ( pun intended 
) .
Despite the huge Heroku exit, I think we are still in the very beginning of something very exciting. There are millions of apps still hosted on ded servers and shared hosting accounts. Large percentage of those are going the PaaS way. So what does this mean for hosting companies, does this spell doomsday? Will customer leave in droves like Brazilians fans after the loss with France?
I am optimistic! I think there is food for everyone. Some developers will go to PaaS providers like Heroku (sits on top of AMZN cloud) and will not ever want to hear about hosting firms. Other developers however have needs that can’t be met by AMZN cloud hosting. This is where hosting companies can come in with their Hybrid / Private cloud offerings with a PaaS layer on top.
I predict more and more hosting companies will be partnering up with PaaS providers and offer some kind of PaaS+ hybrid + private cloud offering.
Either way exciting times are ahead of us, go PaaS and go Brazil in 2014 , I predict PaaS will make more money than the world cup though.
Theo
