YCombinator is a really cool startup incubator that's responsible for one of my favorite link aggregation sites, Hacker News. they're also the funders of Cloudkick, a site that could very well be the killer app for the cloud generation. Here's their one-minute explanation video: Cloudkick Feature Overview.
What's really cool here is the idea that you can set up your cloud applications to switch hosts depending on pricing. So, if and when we get to variable hourly rates for EC2, Rackspace and Slicehost cloud access, Cloudkick could very well become the must-have API. Right now, you'd probably end up with your application living permanently in Rackspace's cloud, since they have basement prices that will have to go up soon enough. But when things settle down a bit more, I can easily see software development teams being treated like rock stars for having their cloud hosting budgets guaranteed to be whittled down to razor thin lines.
And this is only the beginning of the potential cloud holds for software developers. When services proliferate, it'll be services like Cloudkick that end up endearing themselves to development managers. How can you argue with a hosting budget that automatically moves the entire environment to the cheapest option, sometimes maybe even two or three times in a single day?
When we get to tiered pricing based on time of day, I could even see
Cloudkick pushing servers into
Amazon in the morning,
Rackspace at night and
Slicehost in the wee hours.