One of the things I’m most excited about at Interop this year is CloudCamp. Dave Nielsen, Sam Charrington, and some of the other folks behind the CloudCamp events are bringing it to Sin City!

These fast-based, organized-on-the-spot events are always entertaining. And with over fifty cloud computing experts in town for the Enterprise Cloud Summit, it’s going to be a great discussion.

The event is open to attendees of Interop, so just register for a free expo pass and you’re in. You can also come if you’re attending any of the Interop content, such as the general conference or the workshops. And you can of course sign up directly with CloudCamp.

Our hats are way, way off to the folks at Interop for providing us the floorspace and some food and drink to make this event possible. It’s a great contribution to the cloud computing community.

Interop Vegas is turning into cloud week. I put together a quick schedule of the event, spanning four days in Las Vegas.

The week includes:

• The Enterprise Cloud Summit, a 2-day paid workshop on how enterprises can use cloud computing.
• The Interop General Conference, which includes a Cloud Computing and a SaaS track–the latter being run by Jeff Kaplan and Scott and Chris at Tripletree.
• A CloudCamp event that Interop and Bitcurrent are sponsoring which will bring in Dave Nielsen and some of the other CloudCamp creators.
• An Unconference event open to all attendees, which has become an Interop tradition.

If you want to attend Interop, we’ve got a $100 discount code for the general conference. Expo passes, which will get you into CloudCamp and Unconference too, are free.

Enterprise Cloud Summit is getting ready to launch. We’ve listed some of the speakers, panelists, and participants for the event, and I’m pleased to say they include some of the most interesting thinkers in cloud computing: Werner Vogels from Amazon, Ben Black from Opscode, Mike Repass from Google, Lew Moorman from Rackspace, and lots of others. We also have folks from Forrester and Booz Allen Hamilton joining us.

One of the things I’m most excited about, however, is the demos. Dan Koffler of Syntenic is coordinating six live demos over the two days, showing how to build, run, and scale cloud-based applications. It’s always dangerous to do a live demo at an event, so we figured we’d get on the bleeding edge and run six of them, back to back.

ECS is a paid event that’s happening in conjunction with Interop Las Vegas. Since Bitcurrent is running the event for the folks at Interop, they gave us a $100 discount that you can use by following this link this link.

When Google Maps v2 hit mobile devices, it used a clever trick of cell tower triangulation to guess where you were without GPS. Google’s new service, Latitude, lets you share your location with friends. That makes it a great enabler for ad-hoc get-togethers, based on proximity – “Hey, looks like you’re a few blocks away at the gym, want to grab a bite?” But it’s not just about social networking and locational advertising: Applications with location awareness could change the way we live.

The idea isn’t new-Loopt is already quite popular with the iPhone crowd (which for some reason can’t have Latitude just yet, despite their likelihood to use it). But this is Google: Latitude has more far-reaching implications.  The next killer apps will come from this convergence of location-based services, personal preferences, social networks and mobile devices.

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I was on a panel in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago at Cloudconnect. As always, the topic of cloud taxonomies came up. It’s hard to discuss clouds without having a framework about which to discuss them. But taxonomies abound (with good ones from James Urquhart, Peter Laird, David Chappell, John M. Willis, Christopher Hoff, and Sam Charrington) and there’s no clear winner.

I came up with a new way to look at them, which didn’t immediately embarrass me. So here it is, for you to tear apart.

The problem with clouds, you see, is that  criticism levelled at one kind of cloud is a strength of another. For example, infrastructure-centric clouds where IT operators still need to add machines to grow aren’t inherently scaleable; whereas service-oriented clouds that “just work” aren’t as open.

So this model — which I’ll call the “cloud migration taxonomy” for want of a better label, looks at the issue in a way that matters to enterprises: How do I migrate to the cloud?

Here’s how to read the diagram:

• If you have an existing data center application (say a Wordpress instance, or a JBoss server) you can migrate to an infrastructure-centric cloud such as EC2 by simply building a machine image in the cloud. There are companies like rPath that can help with this, and Amazon has a payment system that lets firms like Red Hat get a share of the proceeds from your cloud usage.
• If you have app code you like, and want to simply “paste” it into a form, you can do so with a service-centric cloud. If you wrote something in Python, you can take that code, tweak it (to remove cloud-incompatible functions such as RDBMS joins) and paste it into App Engine. Microsoft is betting that legions of Windows developers will take the server code they’re familiar with and port it to Azure. This is also why Joyent bought Reasonablysmart, so it has a service-centric cloud offering.
• The next level of cloud use is to rewrite the process. If you have an in-house process — say, trouble ticketing — that was written on a legacy system (Fortran on a mainframe) you can’t just move it to the cloud. Instead, you’re going to map the business process, and then use a tool to recreate that process in the cloud. This is where Platform-as-a-Service companies like Coghead, Quickbase, Longjump, and many others can play. The app won’t be sexy; but then, neither was your legacy one.
• At the highest level is Software-as-a-Service. Here, you’re simply copying your content to the cloud app. You might be saving your directory full of Word documents to Zoho, or Google Apps, or Microsoft Office Live. The only thing you’re migrating is the content itself.

When you’re trying to figure out how to embrace the cloud, these are your four options. The lower down you go, the more control you have (and the more work and testing you need to do); the higher up you go, the more turnkey (but the less flexibility and customization you get.) It’s that simple.

There are vendors who blur these lines, of course. Salesforce has SaaS, PaaS, and (arguably) a Service-centric cloud. Google certainly offers Apps, App Engine, and a number of tools like Googlebase that sit in the middle.

Anyway, I’m kinda sick of taxonomies, but what I like about this perspective is that it’s oriented to the issue of enterprise cloud migration that we’re all going to deal with in 2009. It’s going to be front and center at the Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) in Vegas (where, amazingly enough, most of the people who’ve been driving the taxonomy debate will all be gathering.)