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Live blogging of CloudCamp LA 2009

The Organizers

5:15pm – About 10 people so far…

5:30pm – The amazing Persian food arrives thanks to CKK. The lamb is amazing – and the hummus!

6:30pm – Thanks to our sponsors: RIGHT SCALE, Microsoft Azure, alestic, Cisco, Axis Technical Group, & 3 tera. They funded the food, the beer, the venue, and facilitate our gathering to connect, learn, and move cloud computing forward.

6:45pm – Lightning Talk 1: David w/ Microsoft Azure Cloud

This is a cross between Google App engine & Amazon EC2. Nov 17 is go live date.

Cloud models have implications:

• Private – you own it but must manage it. (own the car)
• Infrastructure – (rent the car)
• Private – (public transportation)

100 Globally distributed data centers. Moving the data closer to the customer.

SQLAzure seeks to be relational DB in the cloud. Microsoft is looking to do a hybrid model

7:00pm – Lightning Talk 2: Uri w/ RIGHT SCALE

What are customers doing with the Cloud?

A single admin managing 100 to 1000 servers.
Auto scaling of instances based on load.
Animoto started with 40 servers and move to 4700 in 3 days. Signing up 25,000 people per day.

[Shows many charts showing amazing load variance, ability to peak to extremely high points]

7:15pm – UnPanel (all those who claimed to be “experts” in Cloud Computing)

7 Questions get answered

1. Q: 20 servers paid for + 2 good employees + no power problems. why should I use the cloud?
   A: The hype always precedes the deep usefulness and need of a product. If it doesn’t make sense now, don’t use it. Just evaluate some of the solutions before you invest in your next 10 servers.
2. Q: Ho do I move my ASP.net app to the cloud?
3. Q: When should I stop using Amazon SimpleDB?
4. Q: Large infrastructure, consistent utilization, why should I use the cloud?
5. Q: How do I avoid lock-in?
   A: Carlos: Use systems that have lots of users and developers, use systems that use standards that are interoperable and portable.
6. Q: How do I keep my data secure?
   A: We can’t because someone else owns the disks and could steal them. Although homomorphic encoding is providing some hope of interacting with data without having it leave its encrypted form.
7. Q: How can I put client server apps in the cloud?
   A: Look at each app and analyze it individually. Web apps move the easiest.
8. Q: What is the operational definition of a cloud computing service?
   A: It’s what you use a computer for but with a metered pay schedule that’s scalable, and delivered over the Internet
9. Q: What is one positive nontechnical motivation for the cloud?
   A: Cost reduction, eliminating the complexity of IT, dynamic scalability with no punishment for scaling down, lower risk with little long term consequences
10. Q: How do you build a CAP app? (Consistency, Availabily, Partitioning)
    A: Very carefully as certain architectures do not support it.

7:45pm – Breakout Session Proposals (15+ proposed)