About a year ago, Bitcurrent contributor Ian Rae wrote a blog post about cloud computing. It featured the following picture, which has been frequently used by others since then.
Well, we just saw a Microsoft slide about Azure at Cloudcamp Las Vegas, and I just gotta say…
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:
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.
The first half of 2009 is shaping up to be a very busy time for the Bitcurrent team. We have events that we’re going to be attending, participating in, coordinating, or otherwise making noise at. We’ll post more details on each event–along with discount codes–shortly. Here’s a quick overview.
Cloud Connect: [January 20-22, Mountain View, CA] I’m speaking on a panel called “Is Lock-In Inevitable? Or Can the Cloud Learn From the Lessons of the Past?” with Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady, Appistry’s Sam Charrington, and IBM’s Bob Sutor. Cloud Connect is the brainchild of David Berlind, and it’s a dose of reality to conferences.
Green:Net09: [March 24, San Francisco, CA] GigaOm’s tech conference, tied to Earth2Tech, promises to do for green what Structure did for IT infrastructure. One day, good speakers, in San Francisco.
SIIA Netgain and CODiEs: [May 3-5, San Francisco, CA] This conference is focusing on the business of software, including issues like the impact of mobility, funding in a lousy economy, and dealing with the impact of free software. It’s our first time working with the SIIA guys but the content and speakers are already amazing.
@)A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation - they modify the environment – the inputs – not the human body itself.
Human 2.0 is about breaking human performance barriers, both mental and physical, by modifying the human body and environment. Think transhumanism. Biogerontology. Life extension. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Even baby hacking.
I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.
Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month – check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweil definitely gets the point.
Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.
Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.
Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.
Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.
How do you think it stacks up?
@)Cloudcamp San Francisco, the first in a series of events centered on cloud computing, took place on June 24. If the roughly 300 attendees at this informal industry meet-up are any indication, cloud computing is a popular and rapidly growing subject.
“Based on attendance at recent Amazon cloud conferences I was expecting maybe 100 people”, said CloudCamp instigator and Enomalism co-founder Reuven Cohen, “this is an amazing turnout after only 3 weeks of planning.”
@)I’m in San Francisco this week for Velocity, CloudCamp and Structure’08 and the valley buzz du’jour is definitely Cloud Computing. Tomorrow evening is the inaugural CloudCamp and I’m bracing myself for more argument over the rules of membership in the Clouderati.
It strikes me that for the business minded, the question is not who’s in and who’s out, rather, who’s going to be able to stay in. Cloud is simply an IT delivery model. It comes with high customer expectations that few companies are tooled up to meet. 24×7 availability, self-service provisioning, pay-per-use billing and internet scale, all for $1.78 a month.
I’m hoping for good debate about Cloud adopters, their expectations, and how we can implement Clouds to meet them… without going broke. See you there.
…cross posted to duncanhill.com
Cloudcamp SFO is the inaugural event in a series on cloud computing. Launched by the irrepressible Reuven Cohen, it’s a free mashup of smart people from all over the cloud computing landscape.
It’s free to attend, and if you’re in town for Structure 08, it’s a great way to get in the cloud mood.
@)
There has been a remarkable amount of blog banter about what constitutes a cloud. Most of the arguments have some merit, others are self serving attempts to shape our collective understanding to commercial ends.
For the average reader however, I think much of this banter has done more to confuse than clarify the notion of cloud computing. In many cases the confusion stems from arguments that don’t differentiate between cloud offerings and the technologies that enable them.
What constitutes a cloud service depends largely on the perspective of the user. For users of cloud services, each of these offerings provides a different demarcation point between the value you want to create and the necessary evils you require to support your creation.
From the user’s point of view, these are all cloud computing offerings. In every case, they outsource the ‘necessary evils’ required to deliver the user’s creation. The common threads that both bind these outsourced offerings together under the cloud umbrella and differentiate them from outsourcing offerings of the past are that they are all:
As a user, I don’t care if the service provider is using Enomalism, 3Tera, Elastra, or armies of sys-admins on Redbull and steroids to deliver me the service. As long as I can get it when I want it, pay only for what I use, and have it scale with my needs, then I’m a happy guy (is that really so much to ask???). To the Service Provider it may make the difference between making money and going broke, but that’s an implementation discussion to be argued by the attendees of CloudCamp. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the definition of Cloud.
So lets try to separate the services from the implementation and recognize that Cloud is not a revolution, its just an evolution of an age old business model – outsourcing stuff for people that they don’t want to do.
…crossposted to blog.duncanhill.com
Events we'll be attending and covering in the coming months.
Content that has been recently added.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
