Peter Wayner spent a few days testing cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid.
"The first surprise is that the services are wildly different," Wayner writes. "While many parts of Web hosting are pretty standard, the definition of "cloud computing" varies widely."
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, for instance, offers you full Linux machines with root access and the opportunity to run whatever apps you want, Wayner explains, Google's App Engine will also let you run whatever program you want -- as long as you specify it in a limited version of Python and use Google's database.
"The services offer wildly different amounts of hand-holding, and at different layers in the stack," Wayner found.
Read the full article: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid, which also includes video tours of each.