Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Luke Kanies, founder and CEO at Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs Cloud Predictions for 2013

One admin to rule them all: We will see technology and teams move more to a world where administration no longer lives in systems, storage, network, and database silos, and instead to a world where a single admin uses cross-platform, cross-silo tools to manage the entire infrastructure with one toolchain and from one pane of glass. 2013 will merely be the first step - there are a lot of organizational and technological changes necessary to make this truly pervasive, and it ties nicely with devops and cloud.

PaaS is still sexy but also still not really changing the market. There still isn't a major player truly focused on PaaS. It's sexy, but the rubber has by no means met the road.

The cloud finally dies: Software Defined Infrastructure is what people actually want, and ‘cloud' has become a useless term. In 2013, you won't be asked whether you have a private cloud, you won't be forced to have a cloud strategy, and we can finally admit that most of what people are calling the cloud is just SaaS. Unfortunately for some people, this means you might have to actually talk about your business priorities and technology choices.

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About the Author

Luke Kanies founded Puppet and Puppet Labs in 2005 out of fear and desperation, with the goal of producing a better operations tool and changing how we manage systems. He has been publishing and speaking on his work in systems administration since 1997, focusing on development since 2001. He has developed and published multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributed to established products like Cfengine, and has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in. His work with Puppet has been an important part of DevOps and delivering on the promise of cloud computing.