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I live in Northern Vermont – the closest thing to a professional sports team is the local mid-major school, UVM (University of Vermont), known more for Hockey and Skiing than Basketball. The winner of America East (UVM’s division), more often than not, loses in the first round. However,  in 2005, UVM won the America East and  drew the mighty Syracuse as their opponent in the first round, who some picked to make it to the final four (more on that later).

UVM went on to win in overtime, and became the Cinderella of 2005. It was short lived, but fun while it lasted. For all of those who filled out their brackets, I would bet 98% had Syracuse picked.  Yup, I was one of the 98%. Shame on me – not really, I still cheered for UVM, the bracket choice was due to my aversion to risk.  As a quick aside, as I put the finishing touches to this post, Syracuse defeated UConn in a near record 6 overtimes to shock a higher ranked UConn team - go figure.

Back to Clouds and technology

The key is to carefully consider your providers and ask lots of questions. Analyze the SLAs and compliance offered by the provider (for development needs, this may not be required). The Cloud is a great place to try, before you spend too much money. Set up a program to try a few different providers, and the risk is minimal - a little time and a real litte $. Do not ‘go with your heart’ trust your business and professional instincts.  The little guy here can be a dangerous this - Even in my smal little state a local ISP just disappeared one day, taking a whole lot of data with them.

It is a easy as having a credit card

It is not too hard to try, just takes a credit card and it really is inexpensive, and has a high value quotient. Two examples – The RackSpace Slicehost folks will set-up a ‘slice’ (256MB - ram, 10GB-storage and 100GB – bandwidth)’ for $20 a month. It is raw, yes, but it works, and if/when you like it, it can grow! Amazon is also really nice as well. My first experience was almost scary, in that when I went to sign-up they had my credit card on file from the recent holiday shopping I did – odd overlap. AWS is a little more raw, even more so than Slicehost, but there are some good providers (that ecosystem I mentioned) that can help you get going – like CohesiveFT, JumpBox or rpath. I am not going to list the pricing scheme for AWS, as that part takes a little analysis. AWS is a pure utility model, pay for EXACTLY what you use – read the fine print.

Hope is NOT a strategy

Do not simply trust each providers own marketing materials. Take what I say, or anyone else with proper context trust what they are able to back the materials up with – references, experience and a sound strategy. With respect to infrastructure type services, think carefully about how to spread the risk across more than one provider. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hosting on one provider and doing your backups on another. For open source applications, the choices are numerous, and you are certainly not locked in, if you architect your solution correctly.

Coming up next - Is it really any different than it was 5 or 10 years ago, How new is the Cloud?