• Flexibility – invest nothing up front – bring computing resources on and offline at will
• Automation – from scriptable infrastructure components to autoscaling
• Disaster Recovery – a suddenly cost free script-only solution
• Seasonal Traffic Applications – the cloud is uniquely suited for many websites
• Easier rollout of patches & upgrades, easier deployments, no hardware or networking headaches
• Easier compromise response – take instance offline & spinup a new one
• Easy setup of dev, qa & test environments

Challenges deploying in the cloud

• Lower SLAs & less reliable servers – use automation to mitigate
• A lack of perimeter security – security groups offer a new model
• Questions about where data is located & compliance
• Variable Disk I/O – EBS performance can be a challenge for MySQL databases
• New Procurement process – Are cloud resources considered capex or opex?
• Big cultural shift – pushes best practices and automation into web operations