Cloudsoft CTO Alex Heneveld and ActiveState's Diane Mueller demonstrate how to run applications in hybrid clouds using Stackato -- ActiveState's Platform-as-a-Service for private clouds -- and two open source projects: brooklyn (a control plane for distributed applications) and jclouds (multi-cloud library that helps deploy Stackato in multiple clouds). The demonstration showcases using Open Source tools to do a hybrid cloud that spans both the HP Cloud and Amazon`s AWS.
appfog.com also has outages as well - http://blog.appfog.com/october-27th-downtime-postmortem/ - when going with public cloud, your app's well being is always in 3rd party hands. If you want to mitigate the risk, host your own private PaaS on your own infrastructure - then you can only point your finger at yourself when outages occur.
Check out how easy it was to do this now that CloudStack has added an awesome browser based console with it's new Template & Instance building wizards.
Totally agreed, that's why ActiveState's Stackato (which also supports Java) has a free micro cloud. The Micro Cloud is a stand-alone instance of the Stackato system running in a single VM. This lets you push your apps to an environment that is functionally identical to a full PaaS cluster. ActiveState Stackato gives you 3 ways to test your application (1) on a Stackato Micro Cloud, (2) with an Amazon EC2 AMI or (3) on their Private Stackato Sandbox Service. check it out at http://activestate.com/cloud
How about a "Deploy" button instead, Yes I like to "Watch, and "Share" is oh so social, but what would be much more useful is a "Deploy" button that would take requirement.txt, config.pl, manifest.yml and all those other artifacts, read them, and help me get the app running on the server, the instance or cloud. I can deal with the constant notifications that come with "watching" a github repository - what I want is a simpler path to Deployment.
<rant> Why (when you could deploy your own PaaS layer on just about any Cloud hosting provider from Amazon to Rackspace on any hyper-visor) are people still insisting on paying public PaaS vendors to re-sell them computing hours and lock them into their proprietary platforms - when will people wake up and see that Heroku, AppHarbor, and all the rest are just locking you in and getting your addicted to services! Just once, test out deploying cloud foundry or better yet deploy activestate's stackato (built on cloud foundry) onto the cloud hosting provider and run your own private PaaS http://community.activestate.com/stackato </rant>
You can also download the data as an Excel Spreadsheet - they may obfuscate as much as they want - but if you start leveraging the XBRL tags - you can automate search for that incriminating needle in a haystack...
This is what the SEC auditors are doing these days1
They're one-time use only, so if one doesn't work for you, try another one. If you miss out, you can request an invite code here: http:///www.activestate.com/cloud