No sooner was the ink dry on the annoucement – the JBoss Portal team show you how to get JBoss Portal running in the cloud as well – which, as you would expect, is like running JBoss Portal anywhere else.

Our friends at Hyperic have created a nice dashboard for monitoring the cloud : CloudStatus – which I presume is all based on RHQ – if so JON 2.0 managing JBoss in the cloud can’t be far behind.

One interesting problem of on-demand utility computing – is knowing where you application is running or legally can run – will you need an export control license as your application follows the moon ? Which country’s data privacy legislation do you need to comply with as your application is migrated to where the cheap computing power is ?

Meanwhile – Google just won its largest GMail migration from Outlook/ Exchange – 1.5 million mailboxes. Now Google has to determine if it’s worth moving the cloud closer to the users to reduce international bandwidth requirements.

It’s interesting that we’re seeing (at least) three models emerge :

• Amazon’s utility computing approach (they’re fundamentally a bandwidth, MIPS and storage utility) – you choose what platform you want to write to (Linux, Java, etc.);
• the proprietary SaaS platform approach (SalesForce, CogHead – sorry guys). You trade convenience, agility for complete dependence on the vendor.
• a hybrid – Google App Engine, Facebook. I don’t think these hybrids have anywhere near the ability to lock you in as much as the true SaaS platforms. For example – Google is based on Python, Django – if you’re smart you won’t get locked in. Many facebook apps. also support other ‘distributions’ – so it isn’t really a sharecropping model.

As I see it – the only thing that might lock you in to Google and Facebook’s model is convenient access to their huge customer base – that’s what they’re selling. Take it or leave it.