Standing Room Only at CloudCamp Seattle
Posted by Margaret Dawson on December 6, 2010
Last week, several Hubspan colleagues joined about 300 other techies to talk cloud at the Seattle version of the now global CloudCamp series of so-called “un-conferences”. It was standing room only at the event, being held at Amazon.com’s new headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, which is undergoing a resurgence thanks to Paul Allen.
First, I want to give kudos to the organizers, as this was the most energetic and useful cloud-focused conference I’ve attended. While there were smatterings of product pitches by the sponsors (not in our presentation of course), overall, the attendees were able to interact and gain knowledge from experts and each other. From a panel discussion built on-the-fly to attendees coming up with the break-out session topics, this conference truly enables IT managers who are trying to figure out how to deal with cloud-based solutions a chance to debate, ask questions and share knowledge.
Steve Riley, security evangelist at Amazon Web Services, who I used to work with at Microsoft in the security area, gave a spirited chat on cloud security to kick off a series of lightening talks. Riley knows his stuff, and he loves to entertain a crowd.
Thanks to blogger Adron Hall (aka Composite Code) for mentioning my talk on “To Cloud or Not to Cloud”, in which I talked about my favorite subject of focusing on the solution at hand and not the cloud for cloudsake.
Attendees were interested in a myriad of subjects, which the most popular being Cloud APIs, NoSQL fragmentation and consolidation (a huge amount of interesting in NoSQL), data security, Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, etc. Ton of Googlers (that’s what they call themselves) were there, and there was general appetite to hear more about the Google App Engine. Although it would have been nice to see Google sponsor the event rather than just show up – felt a bit disingenuine.
If you see a CloudCamp coming near you, I’d highly recommend attending. The structure, content and community are well worth your time, and I love the fact they hold these events in the evenings after work and end the conference with cocktail hour.
Tags: Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, CloudCamp, Windows Azure
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