Towards best practices in designing for the cloud

The explosion of Cloud computing propaganda has forced many companies to quickly move towards this new technology. Particularly given the current economic climate it seems like a prudent way to dynamically increase and decrease infrastructure at low cost. However, past experience with SOA has taught us that lack of commercial adaption and a proliferation of unusable standards may hinder this technology. Support from IBM and Microsoft for cloud is promising and leads to the need for strong design of cloud based systems to ensure quality and productivity. Issues already identified in Grid Computing and SOA will certainly prove important in the design of cloud based systems Due to the speed of network development due to cloud architectures, an increasing level of importance must be placed on the design to regulate issues such as: instance access control, regulatory issues, development practices, security and practical operational issues. Capturing and discussing best practices on these subjects will contribute to a healthy movement in the right direction for those who will develop the Service Cloud.