There really are some free lunches in the cloud, but they're not going to last forever. Some very useful free cloud services have gone dark recently, and it seems that even some academic projects aren't getting grants renewed. In the commercial world, some cloud applications have put up a pay wall, now that their user bases have grown and the VCs have grown impatient. The bottom line is that you can't bank on free, and you need a transition strategy when economic reality sets into the cloud. This applies equally to applications, plug-in products/extensions, and services deployed in the cloud.

If you're already following a private cloud strategy, you're almost certainly paying for all the key assets already. This gives you essentially complete control of your destiny.

But you might want to double-check for freebies that you take for granted. You may be using a service -- even something as simple as a mashup -- that has been given away as a teaser. If you can find an open-source version of that freebie, double-down on the private cloud strategy by bringing the service in-house and hosting it in your own cloud. You'll have to bear some incremental deployment, administration, and maintenance costs, but you'll have gotten rid of a dependency.

If the freebie service isn't open-sourced, talk to the provider of that cloud service. See if they are willing to provide a service contract to you with an SLA that applies for as long as you need the service. Beware the tempting upsell: those bright glittery features that the vendor will be advertising for future releases may be the equivalent of bloatware. More important, their "improved" versions are unlikely to be bug-for-bug compatible with what you're using now. Every new feature brings with it more compatibility testing and temptations to rework your side of the application. This usually means integration changes that look trivial but seldom turn out to be. Better to .