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>Web application development is made orders of magnitude easier with cloud computing.

Just curious: what exactly do you mean by this? i.e. - how does cloud computing help with web app development?

The only real advantage that I can see is that cloud computing makes it possible to scale quickly on demand without the associated capital expenditure for 'stuff', you just pay for usage.

That's got a downside too, at the moment you reach a steady state it is probably cheaper again to buy the actual hardware and colocate instead of using cloud services (which after all exist to make money for their owners).

that sounds like it helps with web app deployment, but development is unchanged.

If you look at the Platform as a Service space, a lot of development work is done automatically. For example, upload a spreadsheet and the data persistence layer is inferred from the data itself, no need to manually create the tables, the pojos, etc. Just drag and drop.

On top of that, all the security is built in. Email notifications, built in. All this in addition to the scalability of the cloud infrastructure. No need to build in clustering, failover, etc -- all handled automagically.

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