As a member of the media, I am clearly to blame for the overflow of cloud hype that is currently keeping technology folk knee-deep in uncertainty. Just like my peers, I am convinced that "cloud" is a lot more than buzz, however. Unlike SOA, said to be dead by Burton, cloud is so nebulous and new that the full potential of its use has yet to be realized. This is not to say that I am not extremely skeptical of 99% of all cloud products and offerings: There's a lot of junk out there right now. 

But there are also a lot of questions out there. One of the biggest that I have been asking (and have yet to get a good answer for) is, "What should people do differently when architecting an application for the cloud?" For the most part, folks seem to think there are no differences, save for the interoperability stuff needed to make two servers hosted in the same cloud talk to each other.

But I am beginning to think that there are some serious new paradigms that will emerge in application architecture thanks to the cloud's fluid nature. Whole sections of applications should be built to shut down and go dormant when not in use, and dynamic scalability is certainly still a black art understood by few, and implemented properly by even fewer. As much as we all want seamless, invisible scaling, one fellow I interviewed put it best by saying, "We always promise seamless scalability, but in the end, we always end up making it visible and manual."

In the last week of June, HyperStratus is hosting its first round of cloud training sessions. Rather than fill their courses with hype, this consulting firm prefers to sit everyone down in front of a PC and show them exactly how to set up a system in EC2. It's a refreshing change from the hundreds of companies offering cloud vision classes and prognosticating on the nature of time-sharing, as though that were something new.

HyperStratus was founded by Bernard Golden, author of "Virtualization for Dummies" and "Succeeding with Open Source." On the third day of these training sessions, Bernard has set up an application architecture course aimed at teaching developers how to build an application on top of Apache and MySQL, hosted in a cloud. Certainly a great way to learn about this cool new technology. There's really no substitute for hands-on experience. The courses are in the SF Bay Area and are hosted by Unitek. The classes take place between 6/29 and 7/1, so you'd better sign up now before they fill up.