The Core

I have to say, the more I look into this, the more I like it.  Host scripts or images that many people use on super fast servers and your pages fly.  I like the idea that I can use someone else's work to make my site go.

At this time, I don't see a downside to it, but I will admit that I've not used it.  I just like the idea.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/cloud.html

Has anyone here used "the cloud" for development?  How has it fared?  What do you see as the advantages/ disadvantages of it?

Host scripts or images that many people use on super fast servers and your pages fly

While not quite cloud computed, I'd recommend that if you use common scripts, such as jQuery, you link to a CDN (content delivery network) version (http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#CDN_Hosted_jQuery) rather than host them yourself. If the user has visited any other site that uses the same CDN, the script will already be cached in the browser, saving them a big download on your site.

As best practice for JavaScript loading nowadays is to use an async loader such as LABjs (http://labjs.com/), you could quite easily have a backup copy locally that you could call if the CDN times out.

>permanent data loss

wow, I knew they were down, but permanent data loss is kinda unheard of anymore... I guess you could say it was a real cluster f###:) heeheheh

Hey, lemme get this straight, the cloud over there is different than their special image only hosting setup?  Or is it all tied together?

I agree it is good in theory but it still has a long way to go, I used it for content delivery rather than a full build, the data served wasn't amazingly fast, infact it was just as fast as when it was placed on a shared lightspeed server, although obviously this would not be that case during traffic spikes.

However there are issues regarding leeching and hotlinking that amazon (last time I looked) hadn't provided a solution for (although there are third party solutions out there) and the interface and account management is far from user friendly which is nuts.

With that said it does provide a good, cheap solution or so I thought before the outage and data loss issues. It now seems it is not all it boasts to be, I certainly wouldn't structure my main frame around it just yet, but still worth using for content delivery and streaming that is not of huge value if hacked.