Cloud Camp Seattle 03 Feb 2010

Sometimes it is just best to go to camp, and Seattle is having Cloud
Camp, or an “Unmeeting” of people to discuss the problems and issues in
cloud computing. We will be posting gallery pictures, but you can also
follow us on FriendFeed/techwag tonight if you want near real time information on the event.

5:58 PM Seattle – some initial pictures up on friendfeed
as the room is filling and people are starting to be seated. The screen
has gone that wonderful microsoft blue screen for standby and people
are starting to get jazzed – free drink cards have been passed out.

6:31 PM The meet and greet is going pretty good – lots of
interesting people here from many different companies. What makes this
very cool is that there are this many (about 150 people) at the event
right now – the speaker is coming up on stage and we are getting read
to get this going.

6:39 PM The concept of an unconference – open spaces instead of all
topics pre determined by the event organizers – we get to go learn
stuff we want to learn. What is cool is that AWS, Azure and Rackspace
Cloud are heavily sponsoring the event. It is great when a companies
step up to inform rather than try to sell more stuff.

6:44 PM – Open group cloud computing working group – why are you
doing cloud computing and what are the use cases for cloud computing.
What is your use case, or reason for doing this, business use cases
might mean SaaS, and how do we deal with Security, Interoperability,
community, private clouds, along with the financial model and the
overall plan for using the system. You should also have an
architectural overview of what you are trying to build.

6:55 PM – Microsoft Azure is speaking now and drawing out how the
Azure fabric is going to work – stick drawing to come as soon as I get
the pictures up.

7:12 PM – Hey free drinks – from Josh of Dyn company and the VP of
Project Management Cory Von Wallenstein. What is interesting is how
they are using DYN DNS to help manage the way that traffic is routed on
the internet from a local user to the closest cloud computing
environment. They simply route closest to closest when you are
provisioning world wide. They do this to ensure that the systems are
scaled better by using the little pieces better. Their tag is corny
though – follow us on twitter, were a hoot.

7:21 PM – The unconference begins – what is the cloud going to look
like in 5 to 10 years, how do we manage security, how do we build
services and models around the cloud, what do we really have for real
today. What apps should go on the cloud, and which ones should not.
Really good questions coming in from the audience. What issues are
customers running into and what is the guidance is being given to
companies. How can a service provider ensure that the customer does not
make a stupid mistake – let alone ensure that the customer is listening
to the vendor?

7:25 PM – What is the work load, and how can the cloud enable the
customer to drop their work load, or distribute their work load across
many systems. There are some challenges when taking on the cloud –
there are too many interactions and how many of those components can
you put on the cloud are issues that companies should be looking at, as
well as the capability of the organization to support the cloud, the
distribution of services and providers.

7:30 PM – there are a lot of new Cloud Computing startups in Seattle
– which makes sense because Amazon and Microsoft are here. It almost
feels like Rack Space is odd man out here tonight because they are down
in Texas. But with the two major infrastructures being built out – it
is going to make a confusing market place for managers and business
developers who want to use the cloud, and are getting hit up by many
sellers who want to have the manager buy. In all cases, it is really
going to be important for technologists and managers to understand what
they are doing (Ref Microsoft and Amazon speakers on this) and how they
want to do it. It almost seems like it would be a good idea to ensure
that companies get good services, remember a vendor is a vendor, you
either trust them or you do not. If you do not, don not ask them to
build your cloud for you.

7:36 PM – The amazon guy just recommended that globally
telecommunication companies should be privatized because of the huge
cost in third world countries for bandwidth. Interesting idea, is this
even worth debating or can large companies do anything about this? It
does put a different spin on cloud computing – with hardware costs
decreasing – third world telecommunications and their costs will hold
them back or keep regional data centers from being built to service the
local economy. This is going to be a big challenge for governments and
companies to find common ground here.

7:41 PM – remember that scaling the cloud is the reason for going
there, there is a role in disaster recovery for this, and you can test
disaster recovery scenarios without having to really shut down the data
center. You just provision what you need to provision in the cloud and
run the disaster recovery scenario from there. Also an interesting
concept in case you are wanting to test your disaster recovery plan.

7:45 PM – right now people are working with a least risk or an easy
to implement process to see if there really is a value to being in the
cloud. What message we are missing is that there are company roles for
when to use the cloud and when not to use the cloud. It all depends on
the companies ability to manage risk, legal regulation, and the ability
of the company to have access to trained people who can implement this.
If you are in cloud computing and are trained and able to do cloud to
local architecture – you win. There are a ton of well paid consulting
gigs right now ready for people with these skills.

7:49 PM – the twitter traffic right now is interesting – people are
getting sales pitches, but the biggest twitter beef right now is that
there are no stories from the trenches. No one is saying “here was my
problem and here is how I solved it using cloud computing” or what
issues real users ran into and how those problems were solved. This is
going to go back to the idea of being well skilled in Cloud Computing.
The skills just do not exist universally right now, but that is exactly
what the audience is looking for.

08:00 PM – and we are breaking off into the break off groups. So the
show is starting to wind down as individual sessions happen. The
general meeting is over. I have questions so I am going to go hunt down
the Amazon guy – this could be interesting.