[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dj6AL-XKm0&wmode=window&h=315] Release yourself from the grip of the giant, public cloud and follow Dave Nielsen, the Cloud Evangelist of CloudCamp,  as he aims to create the smallest, private, most usable and affordable cloud around. The process of building a tiny "cloud in a box" is being met through the Silicon Valley Cloud Center, the lab Nielsen helped launch last year. Their aim is to capture the same user friendly characteristics of a public cloud: on demand, self service, scalable, and measurable. At the 2012 Silicon Valley Code Camp, Nielsen showed me the prototype they hope will become the standard. It’s comprised of a controller and another box to run about 10 virtual machines. He estimates it will cost about $1,600 for a user to secure their own private cloud. The little cloud isn't meant for a production environment, but per Nielsen, you could run a small business on it. While they've done some testing loading OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus, they're still encountering a few networking and performance issues. Hopefully the bugs will be worked out soon and a silver lining will be within easy reach. Image: Cloud courtesy of Big Stock Photo.