Cloud Slam 09 - the 1st Virtual Conference on Cloud Computing

Between 20-24 April 2009 I attended to CloudSlam09, the 1st annual virtual conference on cloud computing. This was a global event, using the webex technology, covering latest trends and innovations in the world of cloud computing. Being a virtual event it allowed me to easily attend and listen to several keynotes and talks from the comfort of my home/work office. Obviously this is a huge advantage as not so many people can leave their jobs for 1 week to go at such events. This was a great idea for such an event and a perfect match for the topic.

Besides the obvious advantages of a virtual event, I would like to outline also some disadvantages: besides a rather poor sound quality for some speakers, the biggest minus for me was the inability to focus on a single talk uninterrupted. This because, being actually at work I had to deal with all the usual stuff that I have to do normally (the ones called emergencies). Being on a real event would imply other type of ’noise’ but anyway ;) .

One full week, with talks everyday for at least 8 hours is a big event. Being a virtual event it allowed everyone to choose what talks to attend. I can’t say there was anything spectacular that was announced, but more like everyone presenting their own existing products and views on the market.

I was a little disappointed by the keynote talk by Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon.com called: “Ahead in the Cloud - The Power of Infrastructure as a Service” where he just presented the same old story that everyone I am sure heard so far about how amazon started building aws and how they ended up here, etc. Nothing about future plans, and he didn’t even take any questions. Contrary, his colleague from Amazon Web Services Jinesh Varia - Technology Evangelist (i love how this sounds) had a very interesting talk: “High Performance Compute Cloud” where he talked about the experiences in developing AWS so far and also on some of the cool upcoming developments they are working on (like monitoring, load balancing and auto-scaling). In case you missed this you can check it out online: http://cloudslam09.com/content/jinesh-varia-high-performance-compute-cloud-240.html

There were several good talk on private clouds and their implications, and also on cloud-hosted desktops (that has not really taken off yet and many are fighting on this segment to get an early advantage), like for ex: Stephen Herrod: The Private Cloud: Enterprise-ready on and off premise. Jeanne Morain: Universal Clients - enabling cloud computing for the Desktop - virtual evolution

In case you are interested in any of the talks they are all available online on the cloudslam site. (they are just adding them right now. If you see one missing, just check it out in a while and it should be there).

In conclusion this was a great event, definitely interesting and informative to attend. In case you missed it, you can now listen to any of the presentations as they become available online.