Seattle CloudCamp

To learn more about the cloud (after all I will be teaching a cloud class in about a month) I went to CloudCamp here in Seattle last night.

They had speakers from all the major companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google AppEngine. Here are my brief notes:

• Cloud Security seems to be the hot topic du jour and the way to deal with it is encryption to keep data safe and digital signatures to make sure nobody forged the data
  

• IBM announced another appliance which disperses web sphere images to hyper visors – not sure why they always invent new 1U appliances...

• Google was there in force and was pushing their appengine (they now have some way to use their machine learning algorithms in the cloud) but the most interesting thing was AppScale an OpenSource technology to install an AppEngine environment on your own servers

• Microsoft gave a keynote about their Azure thing which seems to be shaping up. Anyway, they hyped AppFabric as the solution to everything --

• Disaster Recovery in the cloud: Amazon is offering a Virtual Private Cloud to replicate a company’s physical infrastructure and use it for disaster recovery just in case. I believe this will have a significant impact on continuity planning and is something to watch.
  

• Community Cloud – companies/universities/etc. consolidate their computing centers to have one. As example they cited some site in China where in some technology park the provincial government (together with IBM) was running some data center used by all the tenants of this park.

• The speakers agreed that NoSQL is going through some big fragmentation – right now we have >40 NoSQL solution whereas there are only 5-6 SQL databases. This needs to be weeded down to a sustainable amount…

• Another thing they agreed on was that there is no clear, good definition what the cloud actually is