With a bunch of old servers coming back and planned for decommisioning, we are seriously considering setting up our own Private cloud that is hopefully compatible with Amazon Web Services. There's a number of options around that we are considering:
Having our own private cloud means that we can continue to research into cloud technologies without having to pay our current provider (in this case, Amazon Web Services) while we 'mess around'. Of immediate interest is our need to move Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from one region to another, vitally important after AWS suffered yet another outage recently which was widely covered
here and
here and
here. More seriously, one of the issues was the discovery that some disk blocks in their Elastic Block Store (EBS) were being deleted by a rogue process. This was probably only discovered when, during the outage, clients moved across their services from the affected zone to a new zone, or spun up new instances from their stored AMIs and finding out, too late, that these templates were not viable.