Infrastructure clouds revolutionized the way in which the authors approach resource procurement by providing an easy way to lease compute and storage resources on short notice, for a short amount of time, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. This new opportunity, however, introduces new performance trade-offs. Making the right choices in leveraging different types of storage available in the cloud is particularly important for applications that depend on managing large amounts of data within and across clouds. An increasing number of such applications conform to a pattern in which data processing relies on streaming the data to a compute platform where a set of similar operations is repeatedly applied to independent chunks of data.