Are clouds ready for large distributed applications?

Cloud computing carries the promise of providing powerful new models and abstractions that could transform the way IT services are delivered today. In order to establish the readiness of clouds to deliver meaningful enterprise-class IT services, we identify three key issues that ought to be addressed as first priority from the perspective of potential cloud users: how to deploy large-scale distributed services, how to deliver high availability services, and how to perform problem resolution on the cloud. We analyze multiple sources of publicly available data to establish cloud user expectations and compare against the current state of cloud offerings, with a focus on contrasting the different requirements from two classes of users - the individual and the enterprise. Through this process, our initial findings indicate that while clouds are ready to support usage scenarios for individual users, there are still rich areas of future research to be explored to enable clouds to support large distributed applications such as those found in enterprises.