William A. Sempf

So I am sitting here at TechColumbus watching the Unpanel at CloudCampColumbus.  Everyone here has a very good perspective on cloud and the problems and benefits.  The list of unpanel topics reads like a collection of general questions about cloud.

• Auto scaling
• Server huggers
• Hybrid Clouds
• Encryption
• Security
• Compliance
• The business case
• Disaster recovery
•  Scalability Planning

 I think we just about covered it.   We are picking sessions now.

• Intro to cloud
• Architecture for the cloud
• What and When to move to the Cloud
• Examples of cloud apps
• Enterprise Utilities
• Clous OS Security
• Cloud Storage
• App and Data Cloud Concerns

Proof that the unconference idea works?  Who knows.  Decided on the Architecture group, and now am sitting with a bunch of people smarting than me.  Bummer.

So anyway, there is some meta comversation revolving around cloud computing that I have yet to completely master, but I think I am getting the idea.  People are wrapping th ebig providers around themselves.  For instance, ShareThis, who is talking right now, is an EC2 partner, and they just resell the service.  They don't really make or provide anything at all.  It is an ISP reseller.

This begs the question - is this just hosting.  That's all it is.  Noone is really using this for anything significant yet, at least not at this level.  Right now, they are just providing site hosting for applications that go viral.

So what is the highest level of cloud?  What can be done with this other than scalability?  Funny, they are talking about the same scaling problems that everyone has now - caching, bad code, weak queries.  Cloud won't help there!  What is it REALLY for?

That meta question brought a lot of interesting answers.  Brian Prince brought up the reality of disposable computing.  I thought that was a good point - you can treat the computing resoruces as temporary assets.  Where does that lead us?  No answer yet.