Vladimir Vuksan's blog

While we are on the subject of cloud computing the real problem with it is that rightfully or not it has been portrayed as the computing infrastructure "savior". Just check out the description on Wikipedia (and I am not really picking on Wikipedia just using is as a representative quote)

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.^[1][2] Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them.^[3]

Now that you have heard that kind of a "pitch" it is hardly surprising to hear how great of an idea would it be to move everything off to the cloud thus avoid any capital expenses on equipment, avoid having to maintain the hardware, "unlimited" scalability etc. etc.  Trouble is that that is only a small piece of the whole infrastructure puzzle. In reality the only thing that clouds allow me to do is easily "create" and "destroy" hardware (I guess they abstract hardware). That is certainly a nice feature and no doubt has some value. However clouds don't "automatically" scale (they need some type of middleware to do that), they don't automatically configure themselves (configuration/manual management does that), nor they automatically alert or monitor stuff in YOUR application. You have to do that. Lots of it.

This actually reminds me of the "managed hosting" pitch a lot of the colocation providers will try to sell you on. In some cases they would scoff at the fact that you just wanted plain Jane colocation ie. a cabinet, some amount of power, dual network drops etc. No, they wanted to sell you on stuff like managing your OS/updates, doing back ups etc. so that you can spend your time on more "productive" tasks. That is all nice however that provides very little to no value to me. I can install an OS and all the updates through a mixture of PXEboot, console access and configuration management in less than 10 minutes and I know exactly what needs to be backed up. Do I really need /usr/ backed up on every web machine ? No.

In closing while evaluating cloud computing make sure you really look at what is the problem you are really trying to solve. Clouds do not in themselves provide you with magical ponies. You still have to do most of the work.