I don't often blog on specific products or services but I when I recently saw the new partnership between IBM and Cloudshare for agile development I had an epiphany. What caught my attention was not the specific features of the individual products or the combined partnership but the logical application of technologies to solve a long-standing problem. Cloud has been hailed as a panacea. Moving products, services and infrastructure to the cloud is NOT a clear and simple decision. Usually. But if there ever was a great convergence of technology and need it is in application development. Having worked in infrastructure management for over 20 years I know all too well how development is often the "orphan stepchild" of IT departments. So here are 3 reasons why the cloud is a natural fit as infrastructure for development environments: 1. It's Fluid In my experience, IT infrastructure teams tend to focus on "live" production environments. Development environments are not considered production