An 'AWS-to-go' would be fantastic. I will always use AWS in production, but would be nice to have a lightweight dev equivalent. Especially now that I use Lambda a lot.
And of course it runs on AWS, OpenStack, vSphere, Azure and GCP is underway.
Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, the main donor of engineering effort to CF.
My impression is that it is a killer enterprise platform but really heavy for a lot of use cases.
Do you see small teams adopting it and setting it up and maintaining an install?
Convox hits a real sweet spot here due to its simplicity.
I and many others have been saying for a long time that CF is hard to approach due to its completeness and the all-or-nothing power of BOSH. PCFDev is chipping away at some of it; the bosh-boatloader[0] project should take away a lot of the remaining "this is too hard to install" pain.
That said, yes, you can run very large installations of CF with small teams. The whole of Pivotal Web Services is run by 2 shifts of the Cloudops team, I think 2-4 pairs each. What makes that possible is BOSH, which solves the everliving daylights out of deploying and repairing software on an IaaS.
And we have some more cool stuff coming :)
[0] https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/bosh-bootloader
Though, really, if your app uses a lot of fancy IaaS service APIs, even the container-oriented approach still isn't a full answer to enabling dev-time local testability with production parity.
(Personally, I'm waiting for a "mock AWS in a box"—a single binary that presents itself as many IaaS service machines on a virtual network interface it creates, without actually doing any of the heavyweight computation required to run e.g. OpenStack's DevStack. So the VMs wouldn't be VMs but just network-IO-level mocks, etc. I'd love to plug that some application Docker containers into that.)