There are now a lot of Cloud Offerings. Amazon, Azure and I also really like Jelastic!
Jelastic is a great hosting environment for Java and PHP, but can it be used for ColdFusion. Sure!!
They have a very nice guide: http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/02/07/the-easiest-way-to-deploy-coldfusion-to-the-cloud/
Can you do the same with Azure or Amazon. Sure.
For example see this guide: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/java/tutorials/tomcat-on-a-virtual-machine/
Once you have a vm with java you just deploy the coldfusion EAR and that's all :)
A common question I get for people that has just moved to Windows Azure Web Roles, is:
I just want to make a little change to a page but publishing takes too long, what can i do?
Well, there are several things you can do. Usually what I find is that their publishing takes too long because they need to upload a lot of data.. but why? The database is in Azure, so you don't have to upload it, and a asp.net web site is usually just some binaries and some text files?
For answering this question I love to use a tool called HDgraph (http://www.hdgraph.com/)
This tool provides a graphical representation of your hard drive allowing you easily identify which folders are the ones consuming most space.
What I usually find is a lot of graphics (jpg, png, gif files), videos (flv, avi), presentations (.pptx) and PDFs files, that are part of the site. No wonder why uploading site changes takes so long.
if you do that you are not really taking advantage of all the Azure platform features.
Azure provides a massive storage mechanism and you should take advantage of it.
But how do I do that?
First Download a tool like Azure Storage Explorer: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/
Create a folder (well well a container) for example content in Azure and upload your files to that container.
And now is time to set your CNAME record to point to your storage. Normally it will be something like making A CNAME content or media point to mycutesite.blob.core.windows.net.
(If you don't remember what a CNAME is lets say is something you configure with your registrar, the people you pay for your domain, so you can make entries to say for example if the browser navigates to www.mycutesite.com then send those requests to mycutesite.cloudapp.net and if they type media.mycutesite.com they it will redirect them to mycutesite.blob.core.windows.net)
I recommend reading Brandon Werner's excellent for very details quick intro to Windows Azure, from where I took this CNAME entries image.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brandonwerner/archive/2009/11/28/how-to-host-your-site-and-content-on-azure-quickly-and-easily.aspx
Again the idea is that you will remove most of the content of your asp.net solution and change your html so all resources will be downloaded from media.mycutesite.com\content
And finally, take advantage of Windows Azure new WebDeploy feature which allows a fast way to modify your pages directly. See (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud/archive/2011/04/19/enabling-web-deploy-for-windows-azure-web-roles-with-visual-studio.aspx)
When we migrate our customers to Azure, we want them to take advantage of
this rich platform.
Even for a simple deployment you get a Windows Azure Storage Account,
and that account means up to 100TB of storage!!!!! So take advantage of that.
One common thing that any enterprise needs is backups.
You need to backups of you email files, databases, documents, etc.
Sometimes you can have a dedicated server for storing that data, but
all hard drives can fail, so you will need to make several copies of your
backup information, probably use a RAID disk, make backups of your backups
on tape, DVD, etc…
What if you could just use your cloud storage, which is triplicated in secure datacenters?
Well you can!
There are currently several solutions.
For example in codeplex you will find projects like: http://myazurebackup.codeplex.com
MyAzureBackup provides simple to use web user interface.
I have even extended some of its functionality to work with a Windows Service that uses
a FileWatcher to upload files from a directory.
And it is easy to use this application as a base for your backup infrastructure adding some
security functionality like encrypting files.
So go ahead and explore all the new posibilities you have with cloud computing