The cloud. It's exciting. A panacea? Hardly.

I remember when code generators were supposed to eliminate us programmers, and many coders were actually afraid for their jobs. It doesn't seem too long ago that Artificial Intelligence was going to put every answer a knowledge worker needed at their fingertips - and that was at least 10 years before we got the web. There was a time when the greatest technology to impact mankind was computer integrated manufacturing, and General Motors swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Did it revolutionize manufacturing? If so, why is GM nationalized by the US government?

Consider this quote from an article about Scale and Scalability: Rethinking the Most Overused IT System Selling Point for the Cloud Era “This solves the whole scalability problem forever, doesn’t it? Just stick your application in the cloud. Infinite scalability!”

The cloud can give you lots of horsepower at a great price. Virtualization is a wonderful technology. Costs continue to fall, and the cloud enables applications like LoadStorm that were not possible without huge data center costs in the past. That said, the cloud does not guarantee scalability in your web application.

You'll need to find your own bottlenecks and engineer for good performance. There is no substitute for human ingenuity and hard work.