The future looks many, big, complex, and adaptive:

1. Many clouds.
2. Many servers.
3. Many operating systems.
4. Many languages.
5. Many storage services.
6. Many database services.
7. Many software services.
8. Many adjunct human networks (like Mechanical Turk).
9. Many fast interconnects.
10. Many CDNs.
11. Many cache memory pools.
12. Many application profiles (simple request-response, live streaming, computationally complex, sensor driven, memory intensive, storage intensive, monolithic, decomposable, etc).
13. Many legal jurisdictions. Don't want to perform a function on Patriot Act "protected" systems then move the function elsewhere.
14. Many SLAs.
15. Many data driven pricing policies that like airplane pricing algorithms will price "seats" to maximize profit using multi-variate time sensitive pricing models.
16. Many competitive products. The need to defend your territory never seems to go away. Though what will map to scent-marking I'm not sure.
17. Many and evolving resource gradients.
18. Big concurrency. Everyone and everything is a potential source of real-time data that needs to processed in parallel to be processed at all within tolerable latencies.
19. Big redundancy. Redundant nodes in an unpredictable world will provide cover for component failures and workers to take over when another fails.
20. Big crushing transient traffic spikes as new mega worldwide social networks rapidly shift their collective attention from new shiny thing to new shiny thing.
21. Big increases in application complexity to keep streams synchronized acrosss networks. Event handling will go off the charts as networks grow larger and denser and intelligent behaviour attaches to billions of events generated per second.
22. Big data. Sources and amounts of historical and real-time data are increasing at increasing rates.

This challenging, energetic, ever changing world is a very different looking world than today. It's as if Bambi was dropped into the middle of a Velociraptor pack.