Cloud computing is a very easy and cheap way for running software, but be aware of what's happening when the service goes down or you loose your internet connection.

trying to access my web todolist (http://t.co/NJfBLsQ), but 502 bad gateway that's the #problem of #webapps #blogpost #fb

The cloud is in. The cloud is cool. Apple has the iCloud coming very soon. Amazon is doing cloud computing for quite some time with its EC2 service. Amazon is further having a cloud drive. Google is one big cloud company. With Gmail, GoogleDocs and Google Calendar they provide some very popular software that only runs in the Web/Cloud. Microsoft is going to start it's cloud service with the Office 365 solution, which is going to be some hybrid solution (I actually haven't looked at it closer). Chrome OS is going even further: The whole OS is based on applications running somewhere else.

The dark side of the cloud

I'm a big fan of software in the cloud. No more worries about updates or about not being able to use the date at work or while on the road. But beware, there is a dark side: What if the service goes down? A couple months ago a big part of the Amazon cloud service went down. Just last week my todo list service went down. You can't do anything. It's out of your hands and you just have to rely on others.

The cloud for me as PM

It's affecting me in my life. Am I going to use some service somewhere in the cloud or rather rely on inhouse software? Am I going to use a project management tool like basecamp somewhere out there or rather setup something on my own servers? Am I going to use some Todo list that runs on my phone only or am I going to use a webservice? It's up to you. I though believe that in the future cloud services will become more stable and with HTML 5 and it's local storage it should in the future also be possible to build service that can run without internet connection.

What do you think? Cloud or back to earth?