The economics of running software applications are clearly in favor of cloud computing. This means running applications as services. While much of our previous experience with building/buying and running applications carries over to the cloud, there are some new decisions to be made.

The make-or-buy decision for such applications remains relevant, but is now joined by the host-or-rent decision: for bought applications, will we host them inside our own data centers, or will we use a publicly available service?

If we host applications in our own data centers, will we do all the heavy lifting ourselves, or will we use a platform that will abstract away most of the work?

Either way, our applications must run on something. The economics favor sharing hardware between applications. But do we do that using containers or virtual machines, or even a combination of both?

These are tough questions, because there are so many options available to us, each with their own pros and cons. Therefore it makes sense to learn from others as well as from doing.