No one cautiously optimistic about the East Coast data center?

[Sindele]

For some reason it almost reads like everyone has the impression that it'll be permanent, or the concept that we will suddenly be shipped down river to the East Coast NA.

Just a Cloud Server Test that is new characters only, that'll get wiped as soon as the test ends.

As for its purpose, couldn't tell you.
Feels like Emergency Servers incase of overflood/load. Except they're testing before hand where it won't affect long standing character data.

The test giving out free books and 50m gil should be a fairly substantial clue as to one of the true purposes of this test. Hardly a number you arrive at by chance.

There's substantial value in trying to get a full deployment to operate like this, so you have an ace in your pocket if another demand surge arises. It's expensive, but not as expensive as having to stop selling the game entirely. I suspect, however, that the primary motivation is for working out any technical kinks around distributing and offloading instances into the cloud. There's quite a lot of merit to doing that with the sort of instance where the demand is extremely elastic, and the performance and spin-up requirements are comparatively low...