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I signed up Haystack for Mosso today. Cloud computing will change the face of application development as it grows.

In the internet infrastructure scene, “cloud computing“ is all the rage these days and for good reason: it provides the ability for an application developer to scale a service from its embryonic beginnings to overnight popularity without the headaches of server expansion and optimization, all while keeping costs manageable and usage based.   I have to say that after signing up for Mosso today, I believe the hype.  

From signup to deployment, I spent a total of 20 minutes.  We had the server provisioned for a LAMP stack for the haystackmedia.com domain within the first 10 minutes and I had transferred DNS and set up a Ruby stack complete with load balancing within another 10.  We’re spending a whopping $100 monthly at a base price down from nearly $4,000 and we didn’t need to predict how much traffic and server power we would need and then purchase that capacity up front.  The cloud is elastic, and will grow with us. 

I believe strongly in separation of powers, and many developers would gladly give up the responsibility of worrying about server infrastructure in favor of “just writing the code.”   

Mosso is similar to many others that I evaluated in the space, including Amazon’s S3, Joyent (formerly of Twitter) and Media Temple’s Grid Service.  In the end, I chose Mosso because of its simple interface, hands off approach to server maintenance and 24/7 phone support (something that neither Amazon nor Joyent offer).   

I’m intrigued to see how future web apps continue to innovate on the cloud and what that means for application performance and user experiences when developers and designers can get back to basics.