Image by Benjamin Ellis via Flickr

Cloudcamp Seattle was held on 28th Feb. 2009 at Amazon.com HQ (or should I say Cloud HQ?). Between 100-125 people attended the camp, from people who thought sitting on the 8th floor of the Amazon building will take them to the Clouds to those who claimed to have nailed the concept of cloud computing. It was a fun event and I will offer my brief take in this post.

CloudCamp is an unconference style local event held all over the world to create an ecosystem for understanding, supporting and advancing all topics related to Cloud Computing. It was kick started by Reuven Cohen of Enamoly with help from Dave Nielsen of Platformd.com. CloudCamp has been held in many places around the world including London, Toronto, Washington DC, Singapore, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, (now) Seattle. There is one going to be held in Bangalore, Germany, Sweden in the near future. If you are interested in organizing a Cloud Camp in your city/state/country, please check out this page.

CloudCamp Seattle started off with a series of lightning talks from the sponsors including Amazon, Microsoft, IOActive, Slicehost, Rightscale, etc.. It was essentially a marketing opportunity for these vendors. After these talks, five people were selected from the participating crowd for a panel discussion on the questions raised by other participants. The questions were wide in their scope with more emphasis on the enterprise and security aspects. They ranged from “why do we need to download software to do cloud computing” (promptly picked up by a panelist who was from Microsoft to push S+S agenda) to “What kind of architectural changes one should make to move to clouds” to “What are the national security subpoena implications of putting data on the Clouds”. Overall, an interesting panel discussion in a truly unconference style with panelists seated on the floor of the podium.

After this panel discussion, the unconference style talks started with one of the sessions being “What is Cloud Computing” by Dave himself. He introduced the concept of Cloud Computing to the participants giving them an idea of SPI model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS model). Microsoft Azure team had a concurrent session convincing users about the interoperability in the Windows Azure platform. But, the highlight of the day was a talk by Dan Kaminsky, the man who scared the hell out of both vendors and users with his discovery of a DNS vulnerability last year. His talk was titled “When irresistible Forces Attack – Security in the Cloud” and he took the participants on a tour of what is in store on the security front when we do computing at the Cloud scale. He highlighted what has changed and what has not as we move from traditional computing to Cloud based computing. He, then, talked about various uncomfortable facts on the security front in the cloud based model. He concluded the session by emphasizing that these issues should not scare us from Cloud Computing but, rather, get us motivated to understand the risks and how to mitigate them so that we can better benefit from the advantages of Cloud Computing. One of the highlights of his talk was his emphasis on building hardware suited for multi-tenancy. I am embedding the slides of Dan’s talk below.

Last, but not the least, Ward Spangenberg of IO Active talked about the regulatory issues associated with moving to Clouds and what we can do about it. It was a great session and I hope he writes a guest post about these issues here at Cloud Avenue (Hey Ward, are you reading this? :-)). There were other sessions going on simultaneously including how to scale Drupal on the Clouds, Gaming in the Clouds, etc..

Overall, it was an interesting collection of people talking about everything Cloud Computing. This unconference style camps will play a major role in promoting Cloud Computing with people who don’t know anything about it and it will also help us to advance the technology to suit the needs of enterprises and governments. Let the conversation continue.