I see a lot of people disagreeing with the overall direction of "less servers, more services". I totally get it, I used to be one of those people, but I think the shift to "less hassle development" is inevitable.

5 years ago people used to debate whether we should use a virtualized server vs. a physical one. You still can see similar discussions but rarely - we all have more or less agreed that using AWS/Rackspace/etc. is good for a business in majority of use cases.

I think 5 years from now we'll still be debating servers vs. services, but the prevailing wisdom will be that "services" have won.