12 hard truths about cloud computing

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

For the past few months, I’ve been poking around the various commercial clouds, buying new machines, trying software, and running benchmarks. Well, not exactly buying machines — just renting them for a few hours and plunking down a few pennies on the barrelhead. Along the way, I noticed it wasn’t working out the way I expected. The machines aren’t as interchangeable or as cheap as they seem. Moving to the cloud isn’t as simple or as carefree as it’s made to be. In other words, the machines weren’t living up to their hype. Anyone who’s been chugging the Kool-Aid and dreaming that the word "cloud" is a synonym for "perfection" or "pain-free" is going to be sorely disappointed.

This isn’t to say there’s no truth to what the cloud companies proclaim, but there are plenty of tricky details that aren’t immediately obvious. At their core, the machines aren’t miracle workers, just the next generation of what we’ve been using for years. The improvements are incremental, not revolutionary. If we dial back our hopes and approach the machines with moderated expectations, they’re quite nice. To keep our expectations in check, here is a list of what to really expect from the cloud…

Cloud computing hard truth No. 1: Machine performance isn’t uniform
The cloud is meant to abstract away many of the choices that normally go into shopping for a server. You’re supposed to push a button, choose your operating system, and get the root password. Everything else is supposed to be handled by the cloud, a nebulous Great Oz that takes care of all those computational chores behind the curtain…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/12-hard-truths-about-cloud-computing-214920