The Cloud Computing Expo was quite the event and extremely tiring. Long days and lots of knowledge was shared. Below are some highlights from my notes and experiences.
Werner Vogel (Amazon)
- Back in 2001 Amazon.com engineers joked that Amazon.com systems were built with WD40 and Duct Tape
- “We quickly learned databases don’t scale”
- With each user request to Amazon.com, approximately 200-300 internal services are hit
- Each service has a development team and that team is responsible for everything with that service, including deployment and operations
- Wanted services to be tools not frameworks, and therefore be free standing so a customer can use S3 without needing to use any other AWS
- Stax allows enterprises to take existing J2EE apps run directly in AWS
Dave Douglas (Sun)
- Dave had a great presentation, he opened with a top 10 list of “Things You Didn’t Know About Cloud Computing” of which I would like to highlight three:
1) Al Gore invented cloud computing in 1989
2) Amazon only has three customers: Animoto, SmugMug, and the NY Times
3) IBM blank blank Cloud Computing blank blank JCL blank blank fully punch card compatible - Sun Cloud will be open summer 2009
- Dave showed a prototype UI for assembling services in the cloud. Concept is you want a scalable/reliable database, no need to set it up and configure it, just drag a DB icon into your diagram.
- The Sun Cloud API is definitely worth checking it out. It is a REST / JSON API licensed under Creative Commons and some cool new attributes like being completely self discovering after initial request
- OpenOffice will soon have a “Save to Cloud…” option. The goal Sun has is to bring the notion of the cloud up to the end user level.
- Reuven gave a brief overview Enomaly and his involvement with cloud computing
- Talked about how in the talks he had with the various players in the industry during forming the Cloud Manifesto, companies did not want to be open in their discussions; hence the core problem.
- The majority of his session was open discussion by everyone there and it was proposed that a Customer Council was needed to a unified voice of the community can be presented.
- I found this session to be quite enjoyable due to the open discussion nature and hearing everyone’s remarks
Doug Tidwell (IBM)
- Doug is an amazing presenter with amazing technical talent, but can keep a room laughing
- Doug presented on Service Component Architecture (SCA) and used Tuscany to illustrate it
- As software is developed to run in the cloud and use cloud services, using SCA is more important than ever
- Doug had a twitter feed up during his presentation and encouraged the audience to leave tweets and he checked it throughout the presentation. It was quite interesting.
Other items and areas that are worth mentioning:
- Majority of folks representing large enterprises are still waiting for the following two items before moving to the cloud
1) Better security and certifications
2) Ability to run 50% in one cloud and 50% in another cloud so they can handle disaster situations where one cloud experiences trouble or goes bankrupt - We have reached the peak of hype with cloud computing and are now in a disillusionment stage
- RightScale is working on integration with Eucalyptus and will be announcing full details and services end of April!
- When in the cloud, software load balancers are really your only option and therefore become crucial, as hardware load balancers are not an option. Zeus was there touting their products.
- Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform looks very impressive. I am looking forward to digging into it deeper and hopefully breaking it down on here.
