If the cloud was once (ever) bleeding edge, now the cloud is sheer necessity for anyone doing anything on the Internet. It has changed the way we architect applications, build IT budgets, grow userbases, even write individual lines of code. As the Internet continues to lambdify, cloud services will become more specialized; but for now, how can you take advantage of the granularity, elasticity and pre-baked-ness of modern cloud services? And, on the flip side, as your applications expand outside blade-boxes and even beyond individual data centers, how do you design applications that treat network links like second generation buses that won’t get hung up if a service a continent away just isn’t working? And what about the applications that store sensitive data on machines whose geolocation and hardware configuration is unknown?