TJ. Kniveton is the vice president of Infrastructure Strategy at Salesforce.com – one of the most successful cloud computing companies in the world.

In this interview, Kniveton explains what he means by hardware SKUs – a term borrowed from the retail industry to describe unique server configurations. He says the rise of containerized applications and web-scale computing will reduce the number of SKUs present in the data center – resulting in cost savings and easier management, but also additional challenges for software developers.

Kniveton thinks the industry is slowly moving towards the Holy Grail of hyperscale data center design – a facility running with a single SKU.

The conversation took place at the DCD Internet conference in San Francisco, which concluded last week.