When a fit seems forced, as you’ve pointed out, it sometimes means the model’s fundamentally flawed; other times it means the model’s incomplete and needs extension. I’d like to suggest we have the second case here.

Many, not all, of the services mentioned that fit badly in the aaS stack can be seeen as cross cutting aspects of services that do fit the stack; in particular management aspects.

Perhaps the aaS needs a rider or two, along the side of the stack (sidesaddle?). Something like this:

M…SaaS
G…PaaS
T…IaaS

There are a few other cross cutters too. Perhaps we need the equivalent of Spring or AspectJ for the cloud to weave the aspects in.

In short, not sure we should throw out the aaS with the baathwater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_as_a_service

This was a precursor to a complete overhaul of the cloud computing article, and indeed the aaS is in the cloud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Making everything an aaS just won’t do though and the proliferation of aaSes has to stop. Fortunately dropping the aaS and prepending ‘Cloud’ works nicely most of the time:

Cloud applications
Cloud platforms
Cloud infrastructure

Cheers,

Sam