There's different versions of "the cloud". See my article here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computing-services http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computi

There's different versions of "the cloud". See my article here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computing-services http://swombat.com/2010/12/8/cloud-computing-services In short, "cloud" services (aka Software as a Service in the cloud) are brilliantly useful. No one will seriously question the usefulness of Dropbox, for example. Platform-as-a-Service is also obviously useful. Google App Engine is qualitatively different from running your own hardware. Infrastructure as a Service is useful too, if you know how to use it, but in a more limited set of circumstances. The circumstances where it's useful include things like: having an event-based site (e.g. a site related to a sport event) which will need a lot of hardware for a short time and not much afterwards; an app where, due to your solid marketing channels, you expect fairly rapid and unpredictable growth of the usage and you will need to provision new servers quickly; an app where the load varies significantly throughout the day or the week (e.g. something that does batch processing of a lot of data on a regular basis, but is idle the rest of the time).