Cloud expo 2011
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- Published on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 02:00
- Written by Exafort
After attending the Cloud Expo 2011 (http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/) in Santa Clara earlier this month, here are some takeaways and thoughts. Though it was on a much smaller scale than the mega events like Dreamforce, Openworld etc., it certainly brought many well-known as well as upcoming thought leaders and technology innovators together to evangelize cloud technologies and interact with the decision makers.
Since the first event in 2007, the year that the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined, Cloud Expo has come a long way. This is its 9th event.
Despite the economic tightening, (or because of it!), cloud computing is doing well. It is not just a buzz word anymore, and it's already proving itself as the next wave of technology infrastructure. We however saw a gradual evolution of the themes over years.
Earlier, the conversations were dominated by the building blocks, core infrastructure and cost etc. The main topics included
- Awareness & Taxonomy: Why cloud? How is it applicable to enterprises? Public cloud vs. Private cloud
- Infrastructure capabilities: How to have elastic infrastructure; Compute, Storage, Network aspects.
- Cost: How is cloud setup more cost-effective than traditional on-premise setups?
- Availability: Trust the cloud to be available when you need it. Four nines, or five nines anyone!
This year, some of the following themes started to gain momentum. There were a lot of c
- Management: Manage private, public and hybrid Clouds through a "single pane of glass"
- Speed of adoption: Rapid enablement – ‘deploy within minutes’, not ‘days’ or ‘hours’
- Security & Compliance: Data resident within the enterprise, only tokens out on the cloud; security; firewall
- Monetization: Consumption-based billing – the basic premise of cloud platforms, pay-for-only-what-you-use
Of course, the traditional topics of architecture, scalability, migration etc. were on the roster too.
Looks like we are seeing the interest gravitate towards the upper levels of the cloud technology value chain.
Do you think the traditional boundaries between Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Applications (SaaS) are rearranging a bit?
