The Future is Cloudy

According to Google and Amazon, cloud computing is the next killer app of the web landscape. Could computing refers to running web applications in a vendor's computing cloud, free from the worries and expenses of maintaining and scaling your own servers and applications. Sounds amazing? It is. Most applications do not fully take advantage of their available hardware. Setting up and maintaining hardware and services is time consuming and expensive. Lastly, scaling applications is non-trivial and often requires the application to be architected from the ground up according to scalability tenets. Cloud computing can potentially make all these headaches disappear. But assuming that all applications will end up in a cloud is, as of today, unrealistic. Cloud computing restricts developers to working in a virtual sandbox. Accessing file system files is not permitted. Background threads are not permitted. The application works within the strict confines of the cloud's API. While this is probably fine for most simple web apps, it simply is too restrictive for most highly customized, full featured web applications. These restrictions will likely ease with time. When they do, cloud computing may very well become the prominent model for application development and hosting. Until then, the future is indeed cloudy.