Fortunately I don't think that advert has made it to the UK yet! I think the biggest problem is that no one has really decided what "The Cloud" is. There has been so much hype over the very loose concept in recent years, that every man and his dog has jumped on the bandwaggon and declared their service "in the cloud". Hell, I've seen at least one ISP market their POP3 mail service as being in the cloud... so it's in the cloud, as opposed to where exactly?

The upshot of this has been a general watering down of the whole concept, so that when something truly impressive comes along no one really pays attention as they think they've heard it all before.

For me the true meaning of the cloud is an abstraction layer between physical servers and hardware and the "servers" running on them. Essentially like some of the high end VMWare offerings but perhaps more so.

From a server admin point of view you want a server which will cope with increased demand, hardware failure, and site outages. Put your server in "the cloud" and that should just happen. No worrying about where it's physically located, how to increase capacity during busy periods, how to get the data replicted to a secondary site in case the primary goes offline, how to switch over to that secondary site etc, "The cloud" handles that.

Now, personally I'm a sys admin, so I want all that for ease of administration, but I also want to be able to control the underlying architecture as well, hell, we sell hosting to our clients using our own hardware, why would we want to rent hardware / infrastructure from someone else to do it and make less money!

Essentially there's nothing about "the cloud" that is completely new, but I do think in the case of the newer offerings they essentially package the whole thing together, but that's not how they're trying to sell it, and in my opinion that's their mistake. I'd bet most management think it's all techie rubbish, and most techies think it's marketing rubbish.

I can understand why MS are going down the certified route in a way, but I do wish there was a half way house for it. Not all of us are in a position to just replace everything, and it would be nice to have the option with a little more work to introduce some of these technologies to an existing setup.