Hey, I look forward to the day I can charge high rates going in to fix underlying problems for this stuff... So far, those of my clients doing cloud setups typically end up spending 2x-3x as much for my services to sort out their systems than those doing dedicated hosting, on top of usually spending more on hosting as well...

There are certainly exceptions that are using cloud technology for the things they are genuinely cost effective for (e.g extremely spiky traffic; bulk processing; or to manage their own dedicated hardware), but the amount of money that's blindly thrown out the window because the people authorising the expenses don't know how to estimate the costs of these things is staggering.