It was only a matter of time before we started seeing real how-to's pop up on how we can start profiling our Java applications running deep within the cloud. When my long term friend and colleague, Kirk Pepperdine, started talking about taking his world class Java performance tuning skills out of the server room and into the clouds I was excited.

He's just getting started, with this handy start-up for getting your live clouded Java applications directly profiled using Netbeans.

The big elephant in the clouds, is of course the fact that the hardware to which you are running your suite of applications on is shared, albeit in a highly optimized manner. You are never getting the true power of the CPU if you were on a dedicated machine sitting in your own server rack. But just how much of a penalty are we paying?

Many different, crude, tests exist that let you see just how much processing the likes of Amazon will be allocating you, and you'll be surprised to discover how dramatically it differs over the course of the week.

Keep an eye on what Kirk produces over the next coming months as he begins to take his benchmarking into the clouds.