The cloud is indeed real - but not necessarily better. There are real risks associated with it, not just FUD. Outsourcing every aspect of your business can potentially increase your focus on your "core competencies", but you run the very real risk of having a provider close their doors, forcing you to re-evaluate at a moments notice. The "cloud" isn't some magical thing where hardware failures don't happen, it's a real infrastructure managed by someone else. When you hide everything behind the term "cloud" (as in: But we don't have to evaluate their architecture - it's in the cloud!), you risk relying a little too much on someone else's ability to manage a datacenter/network/infrastructure.

Sometimes this is a good decision, sometimes this is not. IT people hate the lack of clarity, because when something fails and they can't explain why or what they did to prevent it (nothing! it's the cloud!), it's their ass. And that's a very real risk.

This is why I like EC2, as opposed to something like Azure. If Azure goes away, you're out of luck. If EC2 goes away... bring up your own Linux, Windows, or OpenSolaris instances, and run your apps there.

Granted, that's not true of S3, SQS, or SDB... but seriously, how hard is it to program against an abstraction layer? Easy enough to rewrite your own "store_photo" function to use a replacement for S3.

"but you run the very real risk of having a provider close their doors, forcing you to re-evaluate at a moments notice."

The solution, of course, is to build your own cloud atop the clouds from a few different providers so that you're never reliant on any one of them specifically. ;P

is going to make the internet just blow up. ... Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

Drink kool-aid much?

Nope. Too sweet.

>Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

Just curious: what exactly do you mean by this? i.e. - how does cloud computing help with web app development?

The only real advantage that I can see is that cloud computing makes it possible to scale quickly on demand without the associated capital expenditure for 'stuff', you just pay for usage.

That's got a downside too, at the moment you reach a steady state it is probably cheaper again to buy the actual hardware and colocate instead of using cloud services (which after all exist to make money for their owners).

that sounds like it helps with web app deployment, but development is unchanged.

If you look at the Platform as a Service space, a lot of development work is done automatically. For example, upload a spreadsheet and the data persistence layer is inferred from the data itself, no need to manually create the tables, the pojos, etc. Just drag and drop.

On top of that, all the security is built in. Email notifications, built in. All this in addition to the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. No need to build in clustering, failover, etc -- all handled automagically.