I honestly don't see where cloud computing is viable except with brand new development. Forget about the costs associated with hardware and maintenance.
All of our applications are designed to work with relational databases through SQL. That means that we have to do all the CRUD stuff, but also complex joins and data analysis. All of the interactions from the data layer to the database, is through SQL.
Google cloud computing uses the "Big Table" storage approach, where data storage is treated as a large hash table, and you have to know the primary keys of the data you wish to access. Not only is this completely unpractical from our standpoint... its a gigantic architecture change! We would spend MILLIONS of dollars worth of time and money to rewrite apps just to get (in my opinion) negligable performance / maintenance / reliability gains.
I know that Microsoft is at least looking at exposing SQL Services as a form of hosted SQL Server (which seems more applicable to most apps now), but how much of that differs from going to an existing hosting provider?
I just don't see the benefit yet. This feels a lot like SOA... lots of hype. When you get down to it, SOA is just an architecture change that some vendors have tried to exploit to sell "glue" products. This feels similar to SOA.
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