Should You Move to the Cloud?

At Oasic we host a lot of websites and one of the most boring tasks involves setting up new servers, either for a new website or as part of a migration/expansion.  It's one of my least favorite parts of the job.  With many of the cloud offerings out there (Heroku, Google AppEngine, EngineYard, etc.), I've begun to dip my toes in the water.  But why not just dive in?

Most Apps are NOT Designed for the Cloud

The concept of cloud hosting, along with its advantages and restrictions, is a relatively new phenomenon and most application frameworks, libraries, processes, and tools are not developed with the cloud in mind.  Heroku's simple restriction of a read-only filesystem for all but a couple directories, means that you have to work around this.  Restrictions on background processes means that you need to work with their related add-on, or come up with another solution.  It begins to feel like deployment is a series of workarounds, and I'm not certain that's any better than setting up a new server.

Middle Ground

VPS providers like Amazon EC2, Slicehost, and WebbyNode provide a middle ground between a full cloud solution and hosting on dedicated servers.  They allow instances to be setup more easily, scaled up and down, and backed up at nice prices and good uptime.  And, they allow full access to the server.  You can write to the filesystems, access databases directly, run background tasks, poke around on the server via SSH, create shell scripts, etc.

Further Reading

Moving to a full cloud stack requires a loss of flexibility that many businesses can't allow.  Here is a good case study about GitHub's move out of the cloud:

http://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace

And, of course, there are many businesses that benefit from the advantages of moving the cloud: inherit load-balancing, fault-tolerance, pay-per-usage, ease of deployment, etc.

So, review your options, consider your needs, and make the best choice for your application's hosting.