Cincinnati Cloud Camp 2011–Recap
I attended a Cloud Camp in Cincinnati last night, which is the second time the event has been held here. Actually, the event was held at the really nice METS Center in Northern KY. It’s rare that I have less than a 40 minute drive to just about any community type event, so it was a nice change to have something really “in my area” for a change.
There were representatives from IBM and VMWare present to discuss some of their options. I stood in as the Microsoft representative and gave a 5 minute lightning talk on Windows Azure (thanks to Steve Marx who did the same thing last week and I was able to steal borrow his slides). I really liked Steve’s approach of a rapid fire run down of a lot of the features of Windows Azure. I went through 38 slides in less than 5 minutes.
There were some interesting differences between last night’s event and last year:
Last year there was a split where roughly half of 60-70 attendees were developers and the rest where project managers, technical decision makers or business folks. This year there were about 50 attendees and only about 10 of us were developers.
Last year the questions to the un-panel, breakout session discussion, etc. were very much in the Cloud 101 domain. “What is the cloud”? “What is IaaS?”, etc. This year people were asking deeper questions about hybrid scenarios, good development practices, private vs. public implementations, etc. It was clear that while there are still people that are very new to the cloud, the awareness of what cloud computing is has grown in the area. Decision makers are thinking more about reliability, services offered and options.
Last year there were many questions regarding the “fear” of going to the cloud. While security and related fear type topics were still discussed in a few scenarios this year, it was more about proper ways of doing security and less about being concerned directly with whether they should go to the cloud or not because of security.
Discussions around reliability (ala, downtime for Amazon and some other services recently) came up quite a bit. I think that good messaging around best practices for having fully redundant and reliable systems running on a platform should be something the providers are having very prominent messaging about.
I was asked a few very specific Windows Azure questions, but most of the discussion through the break out session I attended was just about cloud computing in general. There seemed to be a good deal of interest in Hybrid solutions and the Windows Azure Connect feature specifically in some side bard discussions.
If you haven’t attended a Cloud Camp they are interesting. You can get a lot of feel for what people in that area understand about the cloud and what people’s thoughts are on it. http://www.cloudcamp.org.