Developers have long dreamed of a world in which applications define their own infrastructure needs. But VMware, Inc. CTO and networking general manager Martin Casado takes a contrarian view.

Casado that the app isn’t going to even care about the infrastructure in the long term because the infrastructure software layer will provide a “Utopian” data center service for the app. In an interview with theCUBE at VMworld, Casado explained that the past decade has seen a migration of functionality away from hardware and into an infrastructure software layer. Meanwhile, programming models have come so far that developers no longer have to care about things like allocating cache memory.

Developers have never liked to worry about infrastructure and in the future they won’t have to, Casado predicts. Infrastructure will be completely virtualized with an intelligent and decoupled software layer that manages everything. This software infrastructure layer will provide its own services and evolve at its own pace. Casado envisions a Utopian future in which this intelligent software layer provides infrastructure and a user policy interface that business needs can communicate with.

Casado believes that the current generation of data centers has already ventured into this Utopian infrastructure, but legacy baggage will be a hindrance. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we have a heavy tail to deal with afterwards,” he said.

Watch the full interview below (16:45).