This is the best article I've read on the cloud, as it breaks down the technical realities of the hype behind "cloud." Most of these points have been bouncing around in my head for some time now, and I'm glad a more talented writer manage to get it all down. Internally, we've gone down the plan-for-a-huge-scale-out "cloud" strategy (Wik.is on RightScale with autoscaling) as well as the approach of limiting costs by just using beefy servers. Using technologies like EC2, (which are *incredibly* useful for short-lived projects on professional service deals) sometimes isn't very cost effective (I think we pay about 1/4 of the cost for cloud.mt than if we had matched on EC2).

The best quote?

The operations team is the one place with access to data and traffic that is "real-time enough" to detect business issues before they manifest in significant monetary loss. Traffic anomalies, chargeback rates, visitor retention… all these translate into money. This is what ops does; they make things work; they make the business work. And they spend a lot more time trending, investigating and analyzing than they do replacing hard drives and network cards.

If MT is to become a metrics-driven powerhouse, it will begin and end with that team. Once the team is structured to listen to the heartbeat, it'll become necessary to have a nice dashboarding interface to expose this data to other areas of the company...