It might just be useful for very small bussines with net or IT needs not attached to their main bussines (a small car repair center, for instance) and NOT having any IT staff at all.

Private Clouds like UBUNTU current one ARE NOT PRACTICAL as they DON’T (YET) PROVIDE REDUNDANCY AND REPLICATION…

WITHOUT REDUNDANCY AND REPLICATION A PRIVATE CLOUD IS USELESS!!!!

I mean it’s cool that I can play with disk images (possibly precooked) of virtual systems and that I can put more or less resouces to work on them instead of doing the same iron-per-iron… but in a traditional server room if a server fails usually one or two services fail… whereas in the private clould chances are that JUST ONE server that fails makes the WHOLE cloud fail or most services at once…UNLESS you had that data replication and service redundancy that CURRENTLY Ubuntu/Eucaliptus cloud does not provide.

For now (even at Lucid release) its a good toy to play with, but nothing more.

For me cloud computing has always been a return to the client/server model where a terminal, dumb or otherwise, relies on a server to deliver useful services.

The only differences today are scale and commercial opportunities. The cloud can function on local and global scales and we don’t need armies of internal IT staff to get it set up and keep it running. Google, IBM, Canonical, Red Hat and others will all be happy to provide this service for an affordable price.

Which means even small businesses can really start to leverage the internet to punch well above their weight.

I’m not sure if it fits into this whole “cloud” fad, but FreeNX will do the same thing over the Internet, securely and with low bandwidth requirements. I don’t know why it isn’t installed and enabled as Ubuntu’s “Remote Desktop” by default…