In the Cloud or Not?

Some people love the cloud. (As in cloud computing, e.g. Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure.) Others hate it. They gripe about lock-in, proprietary APIs and so on. (I would provide links to examples of both attitudes, but I don't have time right now, and you can fill those in yourself easily. :-)

I wonder if, apart from the field being young, the differences of opinion may be similar to the different attitude towards home ownership: some folks hate renting, citing landlord conflicts, noisy neighbors and so on. Others hate home ownership, due to the outsize financial commitment and risk (all too clear to many these days), the never-ending maintenance (new roof, new fence, new furnace, new bathroom, new kitchen, it never ends). I'm kind of in the middle myself, having had good landlords in the past, and disliking the maintenance effort/cost for my own home these days, but enjoying the independence.

Obviously cloud computing would be more similar to renting, while traditional datacenter ownership to home ownership (though without the aspect of building up wealth through ownership :-). Someone else can take the analogy further, and compare different styles of cloud services to different ways landlords can run their business. (E.g. with Google App Engine you get carpet and furniture as part of the deal, and meals delivered as an option, while Amazon EC2 rents out bare concrete units where you can do as you please. There's a market for both.)

If that's the case, we should expect that the love/hate posts will never stop, and we'll never convince all haters to love the cloud. But there will be plenty of business for the landlords from those who prefer not to own their own servers, and we might as well cater to them rather than be discouraged by the cloud haters.