As far as the cloud thing goes, it is here to stay. But what, and when it is used for is interesting.

Could servers are very cost effective for manipulating huge amounts of data that does not change constantly, or get massive changes at once.

Rendering on the cloud can cause issues. Yes there are render farms, but they are not the same as a cloud based service. Render Farms have a fixed number of threads that can be processed at once. If you get enough people rendering at once, the server will get backed up. Clouds work a little differently, and can raise the thread count needed to perform something, even if it has to use threads on another server in the stack to do so.

Microsofts Azure Clouds recently ran into an issue when doing this, and crashed. It wasn't down long, but took about a week for everything to work right again. If your a business, can you afford to have all your employee's sit there for a week waiting for it to work? Probably not.

You could have all the rendering done on the client computer, but that could make for a lot of network traffic back and forth. This is the next hurdle. How do you get that much information back and forth. Lots of people have internet, very few have fast internet. Many isp's claim that their connections are fast, but only for a short period. If you continue to transmit or recieve information it is purposely slowed down. Even if you have 100 meg a sec business class, it gets nerfed on huge transfers. There is no guarentee the other end can even do 100 meg a sec either.

Is the cloud good for some things? Yes, without a doubt. Other things will never be on the cloud.

Is the cloud reliable? Actually it is, to a point. But far more things can cause it to go down than a local system.

What do you do when it is down? Simple answer, wait till it comes back up unless the program keeps local backups and will function without the cloud (very rare, because it defeats the clouds purpose to begin with). There is also the issue of what you can and can't put on a cloud, law wise.

Imagine trying to open your favorite program, and http 404 NOT FOUND or UNABLE TO CONNECT TO SERVICE pops up... That has been happening a lot latley with many cloud based services. When this does happen, it can also be a cascading effect when other things that use or rely it stop as well.

There are also hacker groups like Dragonfly, that have turned their attention to attacking clouds... Which is not good since they are considered to be the best hacker group in the world. So good, they are not really sure where they are even located.

There is a lot to be gained from Clouds, and a lot to be lost as well. Clouds are the next double edged sword in computing. It isn't new either, just rebranded so you think it is. Ask your MAC card if it is new.

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