Lovely set of slides Programming the Virtual Infrastructure,, by Paul Anderson of Edinburgh Uni. This was his keynote at LISA last year

The key premise is that when the first computers were built, they were wired up and programmed at the machine code level; HLLs were written so that others could work with them, and to improve productivity, later portability.

Paul then argues that system configuration should take the same path, as with a highly virtualised infrastructure, you are now telling the infrastructure what to create and where. Instead of going MiniMRCluster mrCluster=new MiniMRCluster(), as you do in Hadoop to create an in-process cluster for testing, you can go

Cluster cluster=new Cluster();
cluster.add(new NameNode);
cluster.add(new DataNode);
cluster.add(new DataNode);
cluster.add(new DataNode);
cluster.start();

And then you are off with four virtualised hosts forming a small distributed filesystem.

The next issue becomes: what is the language to use. Paul (and we) are clearly in the declarative world; Sun's Project Caroline more procedural. One is good for monitoring, the other easier for classic-imperative-programmers to pick up. Where Paul does go it a bit further is that he argues that everything deployed in the infrastructure is in fact an agent, and that instead of describing its state, you have to consider describing/modelling its behaviour. That's a fairly interesting way to look at things. Having dabbled in Agent stuff two decades ago (!), what I remember from those days is that agents have beliefs that have to be viewed relative to that agent and the time they held them. There are no facts, only beliefs. That is probably a more accurate view of the world, (my laptop thinks it needs a proxy, that belief was valid at work, but not now it is at home), but it also complicates a lot. Question is, is it a necessary step?