Hello,
This med-cloud tag was indeed meant to help collecting all command line tools in an easy way, coming from the associaction of IaaS as an extension of local clusters. I personally feel that now this is basically a concern of the past. Instead, I suggest to concentrate on all the fine extras that a particular IaaS provider offers. With EC2/S3 this is those public datasets. For other providers this may be something else. And alone since Tony's x2go presentation we know that GUIs are also of interest for those cloud instances. So, I am left puzzled about how we should understand those cloud images. But I do know that I do not want any large instances that comprise all possible packages. I want instances that only do what I want them to do and start very quickly, which speaks against those multi-GB AMIs.
Brad Chapman once prepared a direct-Debian Cloud-Bio-Linux variant as a technical exercise. The construction of those images is crafted by Enis Afgan's CloudMan
http://usecloudman.org/. We all meet again at the Codefest 2013 in Berlin. It may be of interest to everyone to have Brad's Debianisation work somehow automated with information feed from the Blends, which is basically what the tag once was about. That concept should then carry for other Blends, too, like a GIS-blend for instance with the fairly CPU/storage intensive generation of custom Open Streetmap maps coming to mind.
The extra level of benefit for the community of an integration of the CloudMan concept IMHO is the abstraction to other problem domains than bioinformatics. And I would very much like to see if there could possibly be abstractions into packages of all the extra bits and pieces that go into CloudMan, e.g. to get Galaxy up.
Many greetings
Steffen