– Josh Roebuck, sales and marketing associate at Joyent (www.joyent.com), says:
How can pick a cloud provider that will give you what you need?
Some questions to ask include: Is the cloud open (that is, can you easily move off it? Are there long-term contracts that lock you in? And finally, what is included in the payment and what is excluded (are they charged a la carte for bandwidth, persistent local storage, and static IPs?)?
Will cloud computing be around for a while?
Absolutely. The technology is improving quickly, and this makes it cost-effective. It is the only approach that makes sense in an increasingly networked business environment.
Important items:
– What is involved in the transition to cloud computing, how onerous or resource-intensive?
– When done properly, security concerns need not be a barrier to adoption
– The goal of auto-scale is not fully here yet. Those providers that claim to have it, well it comes with more tradeoffs than they let on.
– What are the common misconceptions and points of resistance? Address these honestly.
– The operating system does matter but, so do virtualization strategies of the cloud providers
– The quality of the hardware and networking infrastructure does make a difference in terms of speed and stability. there is more to the cloud than virtualized servers; they function in an environment that matters a lot.
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