Perhaps I'm overthinking it. Things can go wrong anywhere. Prices will fluctuate. The cloud can be more flexible and automated, thus saving us money on people who will minister to the racks and make sure the data is flowing smoothly. If that Web 3.0 application turns out to be a big hit but the cloud is too expensive, it will still bring in enough revenue to pay for all of the reprogramming required to move the app to a set of in-house servers. If it's one of those Web things where the revenues never scale with the costs, well, the price of experimentation couldn't be lower. That's what clouds are ultimately about: They simplify experimentation and change.
Just choosing a cloud can involve plenty of experimentation. The simplest option is to turn up a raw machine from the Amazon or Rackspace cloud, but these don't offer much of what the cloud marketeers promise. Sure, I pushed the button and started up a new machine in just a few seconds, but then I spent more than a few hours logged in as root installing the JVM and the rest of the stack. Once I finally got a machine configuration I liked, I was so proud of it that I wanted to put a picture of it on the fridge. I made sure to store it away so I could start it up as many times as I like.
If you've got the time and the inclination to build up a machine image with the software you like, raw cloud machines can offer you most of what you want from the cloud with few problems of lock-in. Both Amazon and Rackspace make it easy to store an image and hit the replication button again and again. You choose the software and you decide how many machines you want. In theory, there are more machines there whenever you need them. I experimented with spinning up new machines for the daily housekeeping work, and it was nice to spend only 1.5 cents per hour for them. After the work is done, they're gone.
Of course, you've got to do all of the thinking yourself. Do you want 100 machines or 102? Yes, you control your costs but you don't have time to react unless you build more intelligence on top of it.
Java clouds: Google App Engine There's something warm and comfortable about using Google's App Engine. What began as a fairly radical tool has slowly matured into an asset that's easier to understand and use, if only because the world has adopted many of the ideas.
