Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are asking the question, “Should I commit my organization’s software applications to the cloud, and if so what would be the performance and cost?” The Silverlining research project provided twenty-one University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) graduate students with a platform to answer this question, by benchmarking the performance and cost of applications in the Google GAE cloud. The industry standard On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) benchmarks and the follow-on cloud simulation forecaster were designed to guide industry CIOs, as well as system/software engineers, through the new cloud applications development and operations lifecycle. The UT Dallas Silverlining team extended the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s (TPC) OLTP benchmark to operate, for the first time, over the internet into the Google App Engine (GAE) cloud using two very different database engines (CloudSQL and Datastore/NoSQL).