Cloud computing

Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty | The Register

From the article ...

Amazon's EC2 was likely the brainchild of a mid-level ops director who overbought for a data center and had to come up with a way to save his own ass. Use a free, open source project like Xen for virtualization, give it a sunshine-up-the-ass name like Elastic Compute Cloud, and start pulling in all those venture capital dollars like Cisco and Sun did during the first dotcom catastrophe. Fuck me, give that man a raise.

If you ask me, I'd say the jury is still out on this iteration of cloud/distributed/what-ever-the-name-you-call-it computing. But I use Amazon EC2 in a production environment and they have been pretty impressive so far. Although I must agree with the following conclusion;

No matter what the name, you, the developer, will still be dealing
reliability and accountability. Using someone else's infrastructure for
your application will forever be a business risk, but it sounds so much
less so with a cuddly name. Your CTO will fall for the next cycle
pretty easily. The compunction he feels for his latest data center
build-out will outweigh the downsides of an external dependency.