1) You are absolutely right that, for sophisticated apps/sites, you need a capable operations staff. For apps that can run on the more abstracted stacks, like AppEngine, though, there can be little need for additional operations folk. Fitting within the length target for the article meant focusing on one aspect of the total problem. Perhaps we can do another about operations.

2) While you can certainly get started on a DSL line and a machine under your desk, the cloud is far more attractive, in my opinion. The costs are usually quite small to start and the availability and scalability advantages are enormous. Bootstrapping doesn’t have to mean skimping on infrastructure, anymore.

3) Force.com could be seen as expensive. It could also be seen as incredibly cheap because there is no capex and no large, up front software investment. If something is not part of your core business, outsourcing it can be a big win. Hence, force.com. Please remember that there is no free lunch: complexity doesn’t disappear by moving to cloud offerings, it just moves up the stack where it can be more easily and cheaply managed.

4) AppEngine had to start somewhere and, since Google has incredible depth in Python that’s what they chose. I don’t expect they’ll stay Python-only and I absolutely agree with their logic. Go with what you know, then work out from there.

5) There is, indeed, no kicking the cloud. I see that as a good thing.

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However, you fail to point out that…

1) OF COURSE you still need great operations engineers, even if you’re running completely on the cloud. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

2) Plentyoffish.com ran on Markus Frind’s desktop machine and an Internet connection for lord-knows-how-long. Probably way longer than anyone reasonable would do so. But still, it goes to show you that even cloud computing is overkill for most projects. Get yourself a DSL line and a static IP address, and you can get started.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html

3) The pricing of Force.com is unbelievably expensive. Plus, it just pushes the hassles to a different layer of the stack.

4) Google App Engine only lets me write apps in Python 2.5. Exsqueeze me? Baking power? How about PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl, or (gulp!) C#? Or will they gladly kick me over to Amazon and/or Microsoft for those applications which represent, oh I don’t know, like 99.999% of all web traffic?

5) I like hardware because I can kick it. There’s no kicking the cloud, man.

^_^