If he lives near Los Angeles, UCode (www.ucode.com) teaches kids how to program through worksheets and exercises. Sounds ideally suited for him. The Ruby programming language is used. Ruby is an excellent choice for an 11 year old, easy to get started and serious enough to do amazing production applications (particularly for the web). There are some great tutorials online including tools to try ruby code (tryruby.org and 19pad.charlie.bz). Code School has a free short course using tryruby: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-ruby.

This is not a "cloud" problem. This is a virtual server and image problem. Clouds have nothing to do with virtual servers. If you use a service like NewServers.com, you can get dedicated physical servers for your cloud, on-demand and at hourly prices.