some time ago someone brought to my attention the growing availability of the new so-called cloud services.

I found that statement funny (to say the least), because both of us were GMail users for quite a while. I went on explaining that GMail is in fact a cloud application with all the intended features, high-availability, ease of use, no scaling issues and above all, it’s free!

but his question was another, it meant on how we can easily create a web application and deploy it for free, and not caring wether the server will cope with high usage. I then went off for a while and tried to find some more information.

Amazon has the EC2 service ([Elastic Cloud 2|http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/|en]), but you pay for the service and for the used bandwidth. since that was not the intended stuff, I went on.

Google has the [AppEngine|http://code.google.com/intl/pt-PT/appengine/|en], a free for low usage service (quota based), in which you have an API to access a wide range of features provided by the service, which also include database access. for me the only ‘problem’ it poses is that ir requires that you write your application in either [Python|http://www.python.org/|en] or [Java|http://www.java.com|en], languages that I personally don’t master at all.

but all these services, however great, leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth, should we really depend that much on other providers? well, the answer is really: yes and no!

the server that hosts this website cost about 30€ per year, while the Google solution would be free. alas, I have other stuff in here, besides the blogs, which I couldn’t have with Google. but what I can do is create an application that has bits in the cloud, like the [Wolfire|https://blog.wolfire.com/2009/03/google-app-engine-for-indie-developers/|en] guys use for the main website.

getting back to this post title, should we rely on cloud services or do they really seem as couldy as they do to me?

your feedback is appreciated