One of the things we'll all have to start thinking about more often, once the cloud is commonplace, is the movement and maintanence of virtual machines. That means you'll be spending a lot more production time tweaking and pruning operating systems so that they are as small and nimble as can be. If you're building an application that will run on a LAMP stack within the cloud, you'd obviously want to remove everything you don't need from the L portion of that stack. If you're using Debian as you L, for example, you can remove things like Bind, Desktop images, and all those desktop graphics frameworks you won't be using (GTK, qt, Gnome libs). Traditionally, this has been known as "making an application into an appliance."

To this end, Suse introduced Suse Studio, today. This new service allows you to tailor your own Suse installation, then download it prepackaged as a CD image, a VMware image, or a Xen image. This can save you time and processing power, which translates into a faster application, and a smaller Amazon bill. I would expect we will soon be seeing more of this type of thing from the operating system vendors.

Next on the list is the virtual machine repository, which IBM seems to already be working on. Unfortunately, IBM chose purple.