Instances of embedded devices on the cloud or an overkill ??

A short discussion with Aditya Vikram Thoomati has led me to believe that there indeed is some scope for running embedded and thin devices on the cloud. The topic might end up being controversial and boils down to a chicken-egg-chicken problem, the reason is that, the concept of cloud has come about mostly because people wanted their bulky machines to run on a platform which was available from anywhere and could be accessed on thin clients. Now as the cloud technologies advance, people might start using and monitoring their cloud instances from embedded devices such as phones, tablets etc. Now this is a great change, but when you think about running instances of the same embedded devices on the cloud, its recursion. And, also I don't see any good reason for running embedded device instances on the cloud, as I see it there are two complications :

• One, that there are far too many embedded devices and platforms, so basically giving general support for them on the cloud is going to be tough .
• Second, the only use of providing an instance of an embedded platform might only prove useful to the board's testers or to a few application developers.

But still, for some reason, I see a good chance that developing cloud solutions which can provided emulated instances of a few standard or all embedded platforms will be of some use.