[piggity]

The other issue is that you can have redundant services, but when the control plane goes down - you are screwed.

Every day I have to build basic redundancy into my applications I wish that we could just go with a service provider (like Rackspace / Contegix) that offered more redundancy at the hardware level.

I know the cloud is awesome and all, but having to assume your disks will disappear, fail, go slow at random uncontrollable times is expensive to design around.

If you don't have an elastic load, then the cloud elasticity is pointless - and is ultimately an anchor around your infrastructure.