As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation, maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your database software and you were the DBA managing all aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …