Cloud computing is a fascinating concept.  It offers greenfield opportunities (or more appropriately, blue sky frontiers) for businesses to affordably scale their infrastructure needs without plunking down a huge hardware investment (and the space/power/cooling costs associated with managing your own hosted environment).  This removes the risks of mis-provisioning by enabling on-demand scaling according to your data growth needs.  Especially in these economic times, the benefits of Cloud computing are very attractive.

But let’s face it - there’s also a lot of hype, and it’s hard to separate truth from fiction.  For example, what qualities would you say are key to data warehousing in the cloud?

Here’s a checklist of things I think are important:

[1] Time-To-Scalability.  The whole point of clouds is to offer easy access to virtualized resources.  A cloud warehouse needs to quickly scale-out and scale-in to adapt to changing needs.  It can’t take days to scale…it has to happen on-demand in minutes (<1 hour).

[2] Manageability.  You go with clouds because you not only want to save on hardware, but also on the operational people costs of maintaining that infrastructure.  A cloud warehouse needs to offer one-click scaling, easy install/upgrade, and self-managed resiliency.

[3] Ecosystem.  While clouds offer *you* huge TCO savings, you can’t compromise service levels for your customers - especially if you run your business on the cloud.  BI/ETL/monitoring tools, Backup & Recovery, and ultra-fast data loading can’t be overlooked for “frontline” mission-critical warehousing on the cloud.

[4] Analytics.  Lots of valuable data is generated via the cloud and there are opportunities to subscribe to new data feed services.  It’s insufficient for a cloud warehouse to just do basic SQL reporting.  Rather, it must offer the ability to do deep analytics very quickly.

[5] Choice.  A truly best-in-class cloud warehouse won’t lock you in to a single cloud vendor.  Rather, it will offer portability by enabling you to choose the best cloud for you to run your business on.

Finally, here are a couple ideas on the future of cloud warehousing.  What if you could link multiple cloud warehouses together and do interesting queries across clouds?  And what about the opportunities for game-changing new analytics - with so many emerging data subscription services, wouldn’t this offer ripe opportunities for mash-up analytics (eg. using Aster SQL/MapReduce).

What do you think are the standards for “best-in-class” cloud warehousing?