Golden Image or Foil Ball? (VM maintenance issues)
madstop.com
madstop.com
The fuck it isn't -- “the cloud” is so much more than the x86 provisioning frippery of EC2 et. al. They provide no logical abstraction, only a physical one.
Hadoop, S3, Google App Engine, Heroku, and other real platforms let you completely avoid dealing with machine-level bullshit.
The problem is that their constraints rule them out for a wide variety of use-cases, I'd go as far as to say: most use-cases.
When building anything serious (and no, the next twitter-bot doesn't qualify) you quickly realize that you'll have to deal with at least some of the machine-level bullshit - because otherwise you'd be either paying through your nose, or simply not be able to implement what you need.