Reporting from CloudCamp Auckland – “CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”
Questions from the floor about Cloud Computing…
What is the Value? – CloudBreak was involved in the New Zealand Post Google apps implementation. For them it’s about value – NZ Post discovered hard savings of $500k per annum by moving to a Google email infrastructure.
Why develop in the clouds? – Gen-i talked about the development benefits of a cloud dev environment – allows for rapid A/B testing and means that a business is used to thinking in terms of integration – the use of APIs and the like. To make the decision though metrics are needed for current costs – to make an informed decision based purely on ROI is difficult.
What shortages does New Zealand need to overcome? We suffer from latency, the speed of light cannot be sped up. Need local cloud hosting offerings in order to remove this problem. Local companies need to develop with a global perspective and ambition.
Tools and techniques for highly variable load? James Valentine from Fronde has recently been using EC2 for a client. He contends that PaaS is cheap but tends to be inflexible, force.com will shut off service once API limits have been breached – ensure you chose the correct platform based on where the bulk will be – page impressions? processing cycles? storage?
There were murmurings of discontent from the audience about the lack of focus on value proposition around cloud computing – hopefully later sessions will address those concerns.
Just on Force.com API limits, Enterprise Edition is limted as follows:
1,000 calls per license per 24-hour period, or 1,000,000 calls per organization per 24-hour period, whichever is lower. Minimum rate is 5,000 calls per 24-hour period regardless of the number of licenses
Of course API limits only come into play if you’re building beyond Force.com. A native app built entirely on Force.com won’t need to use the API.
Thanks for the summary Ben. It was a good afternoon on Saturday with some interesting discussions had.
Just to clarify my comments slightly around PaaS limits (and the Force.com example) – I’m not actually negative that the various limits exist. In fact, I see them as vital to ensure that no single application adversely affects the operation of other applications.
My key point was that when developing applications for the cloud – and PaaS specifically – make sure that you understand the limits that are imposed and architect appropriately so they are unlikely to become an issue for you.
For example, in a recent Salesforce.com implementation we redesigned a particular process slightly to change it to being an outbound message from Salesforce, rather than an inbound message from a 3rd party system – thus largely eliminating the chance of hitting limits.
James – point taken. Cheers for the clarification (and thanks for the nice continuum diagram which will be lifted for CloudAve use sometime soon
)