Getting started with Riak in the Cloud involves provisioning a Riak cluster on Engine Yard and optimizing it for performance. Key steps include choosing instance types like m1.large or m1.xlarge that are EBS-optimized, having at least 5 nodes, setting the ring size to 256, disabling swap, using the Bitcask backend, enabling kernel optimizations, and monitoring and backing up the cluster. Benchmarks show best performance from high I/O instance types like hi1.4xlarge that use SSDs rather than EBS storage.