The leap to the cloud has dramatically changed how both development and operations work in the enterprise; but one thing that it’s done in a very fundamental sense is bring down the overhead from the mesosphere of expensive in-house private infrastructure into the troposphere with the cloud. Amazon Web Services puts startups and small groups of developers in a position where they can purchase, provision, and run their own little virtual data centers without needing to rent out massive buildings or get tied to specific vendors.

This month at the AWS Summit, numerous speakers from different services came out to talk about how cloud services and the concept of “CloudOps” is adjusting the way that companies see DevOps. To highlight this, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick joined up in theCube, SiliconANGLE and Wikibon’s conference-related video series, to talk with industry moguls and executives about how AWS has affected them.

During his opening video clip, Vellante explained the real leverage behind AWS, “The power of Amazon is in enabling startups to put developers on projects without needing to ship giant bits of equipment–now, more than ever, much of application development and production can be shifted into the cloud or offsite into data centers using infrastructure-on-demand.”

We’ve been seeing this a great deal with software development lifecycles shifting away from running on private software and into the cloud to save money.

Shawn Douglas, CTO of ServiceMesh, mentioned that much of the place of IT can be shifted into the cloud and, due to its piecemeal and componentized capability. Development and operations mesh together well when it’s possible to purchase bits of virtualized infrastructure from the cloud on a need-to-use basis, spinning up instances to do development and testing, or generating environments on the fly that “look and act” like production environments—and then just let them go back into the ether when they’re no longer in use.

“We enable somebody to operate in that sort of environment,” says Douglas on the subject of the cloud and DevOps around 3:50 , “take what may have been shadow IT or just development out there and incorporate that into their application development lifecycle. Maybe dev in test on AWS, and maybe they roll something into a vblock on their private cloud solution, and allow them to become part of their lifecycle ‘at the right time, in the right place, at the right cost.’”

The case of Atomic Fiction and moving visual FX budgets into the cloud with AWS

Ryan Tudhope of Atomic Fiction told Vellante in theCube that AWS enabled his company to remain competitive in a sphere alongside other extremely high-powered special FX companies. FX is a sphere of work that involves extremely expensive software (Maya, 3DS Max) and lots of expensive equipment in the form of render farms, massive-horsepower GPU systems, etc. So using AWS in order to move and sift through data meant that Atomic Fiction could go to market and virtualize much of their heavy crunching off into the cloud.

In many ways, Tudhope said that he believes that the next revolution into the cloud will be all-abstraction. That looking at how Atomic Fiction had used the cheap-easy-and-quick method of AWS provisioning to save money, add value to their project, and produce stunning visual effects (a real workhorse project) could also mean that many businesses in the future might start looking to move all their operations and development into the cloud and just have dumb-terminals in the workplace to act on cloud-instanced virtual CPUs.