There is an emergence of cloud computing application development platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Google's AppEngine and Amazon's EC2/SimpleDB. Startups and enterprise developers alike, lured by the promise of 'infinite scalability', 'ease of development', 'low infrastructure set up cost', are increasingly using these cloud service building blocks to contruct their web based application, that in turn consume and deliver services. In this tutorial, we firstly provide an overview of these cloud computing application development environments and platforms. We demonstrate the programming, debugging and monitoring capability; we use performance evaluation techniques to motivate the analysis of underlying platform architecture, and deriving a 'fit for purpose' evaluation for these platforms. We will introduce the suite of test applications we used, motivation for their design. We will also present the challenges we faced along the way, and how we coped with testing essentially a block box component in the cloud.