Now you have to deal with the location for development and deployment, whether you go traditional, public, or private I enjoyed Bill Claybrook’s recent article “Cloud vs. in-house: Where to run that app?” While he covered the basic host-versus-outsource decisions, as well as the new architectural options of public and private clouds, what was most interesting is the dilemma many in IT are finding around having new choices.Let’s limit this question to new applications: Where should you build them? On-premise using traditional platforms? Public cloud? Or private cloud? While the questions in the past were just around the hardware, software, and development platform, now you have to deal with the location for development and deployment, and whether you go traditional, public cloud, or private cloud.The best approach that I’ve found is to consider your requirements first, and see if you can knock a few platform contenders off the list. You need to examine — in order — security, privacy, compliance, performance, and then features and functions of the platform. You do this so that you can knock public clouds out of contention quickly, if indeed they aren’t a good fit. In many instances, application requirements around security and privacy will be enough not to consider public clouds, and legal issues may dictate where applications and data can reside. If the application is a good candidate for public clouds, you then can take into account the development, testing, and deployment features of the public cloud offerings — typically, infrastructure and platform providers such as Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, and Salesforce.com’s Force.com.If public clouds are not an option, not to worry. You can certainly build your own private cloud, leveraging virtualization technology to provide better server utilization. Or you can go old-school, with one application for one server. We clearly know how to do that.Why this may seem confusing to many, I find this very liberating, considering we now have new and innovative architectural options for developing and deploying our applications. While I see most new applications still being deployed on traditional platforms, many are finding that private clouds provide a much better bang for the data center buck, and public clouds are maturing quickly and becoming a highly elastic and cost-effective solution. Options are a good thing — trust me.This article, “2010’s big cloud question: Where should I run my application?,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of David Linthicum’s Cloud Computing blog and follow the latest developments on cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. Cloud Computing