software or hardware. And to be fair, almost every IT person I know wants to spend their time building new applications and services, not babysitting infrastructure. Traditionally IT vendors sell to "operators," people responsible for the administration and maintenance of systems. These are the people who go to the big annual vendor conferences, wear crazy hats and dance to aging rock bands like Blues Traveller at some Las Vegas Hotel. The shift to Cloud Computing, built on the back of virtualization technologies, is turning this upside down. Indeed, all the new energy in the cloud computing communities including OpenStack, CloudStack, Amazon Web Services, etc., is about shifting the power to the developers. As Marc Andreessen pointed out last year in a contribution to the Wall Street Journal, Software is Eating the World , the rise of the software economy is transforming and consuming entire industries. Software is also eating IT. Virtualization - which allows you abstract and generalize compute, storage, and now networking technologies so that can be consumed as software - is automating the very factory floor of IT. Just as robots took over the manufacturing process in industries like automobiles, a similar phenomenon is happing in computing. This is a good thing. Unlike carbon-based life forms, distributed software systems do not call in sick, almost never are distracted by Facebook and rarely make configuration mistakes. As more and more applications and computing move into virtualized clouds, the burden of operating computers drops dramatically, including the need for human