Comment Re: It's the cloud (Score 2) 146
Is there currently an open source alternative[to the closed alternative]?
Yes there is: Abundandt dirt cheap hardware.
In the grand scheme of things cloud computing is just a fad like SAS or Network Computing was before, in order to hijack peoples stuff and hold it ransom. Nobody short of the bazillionth pinterest clone thgat has to scale by 100 orders of magnitude in 3 weeks because of the hype train coming in is going to fall for that. It's all same shit, different name.
Cloud development is all the hype because the toolstacks we use may be FOSS and the best there is, but they're still 15 - 20 years old (LAMP anyone?) and miles away from what would technically be possible today. Eventually you'll be able to meta-prototype an app with few clicks of a button and be able to deploy it whereever you want in a matter of seconds and the whole stack for that will be FOSS with the entire app and datalayer abstracted and encrypted two levels up. No one will give a shit about cloud space then, short of buying 30 gigs and 20 gigaflops of it with their mobile phone package as a signing bonus.
Until then I'd suggest you stay away from the cloud and build your own toolchain and runtime kit on last years decommisioned laptops that are a dime a dozen. It's faster, cheaper and you can do it when the web is down. Unless you belong to that crew mentioned above that's building said twitter clone, has to scale yesterday and is going out of business in 2 years anyway.