CloudCamp experience!

Last week, I attended the CloudCamp Hyderabad 2010 and it was really an amazing experience catching up with the professionals on Cloud Computing. As I have posted earlier, CloudCamp India 2010 has been organized across five cities in India from Feb 20 – 28, 2010. The Hyderabad edition of it happened at IIIT, Hyderabad on Feb 25, 2010. The unconference was kick started by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), co-founder of CloudCamp, with a quick intro to Cloud computing and CloudCamp. Though I have attended few barcamps before, this was the first time I got the feeling of being in an unconference. Following Dave, it was Ramesh from Hexagrid, one of the sponsors of the event, to talk about cloud computing. Then, Dave unleashed the Unpanel – the panel was formed by picking up around seven experts from the attendees. Questions were invited from the attendees and each member of the panel has to answer one question in just one minute. 

 UnPanel

Q0: What is cloud computing in plain English?
[Panel Member]: Way of computing that shares resources over the Internet. No need to invest on hardware and can concentrate on developing the business.

Q1. How will cloud computing change the software development cycle and IT support?
[P]: If a dev team asks for a new hardware / software, it generally takes time to setup. But, on a cloud, hardware can be extended easily and so the IT support will be faster.

Q2. How is private cloud different from data center?
[P]: Private cloud has the elastic nature. Data centers are physical machines and are not elastic.

Q3. Cloud Vs Virtualization
[P]: Virtualization is a subset of cloud.

Q4. How secure is my data on cloud?
[P]: Cloud has the same level of security as data center. Data can be encrypted while going to cloud. Private clouds can be used if the data is critical.

Q5. How difficult is to migrate to Cloud?
[P]: Very easy. Just need to upload the data and it will be spread over the cloud.

Q6. Standard for PAAS (Platform As A Service)?
[P]: No

Q7. Will Cloud computing replace the traditional computing or co-exists?
[P]: Co-exists. Not all the application required to be moved to cloud. Only heavy apps with huge volume of data and high CPU requirements would be benefited on the cloud.

Q8. How easy it is to replicate the data on cloud?
[P]: Very easy. If you have an open disk image, you can attach it easily to Amazon cloud and get as many machines as you require. Data replication will be taken care internally by the provider.

Open sessions

After the Unpanel, there were open sessions on the topics chosen by the attendees. Some of the topics of discussions include What is Cloud computing?, Security on Cloud computing, Performance / Interoperability on the cloud, Private cloud, Microsoft Azure, Return of Investment of going to cloud, free tools available on the cloud. I attended the session Performance / Interoperability on the cloud along with Parashuram (@nparashuram), HimaBindu(@himanet). After this session, I attended another awesome session with Parashuram on free tools. The discussions were really nice and learnt a lot from both the sessions. Shall post more about them as I explore.

Dave brought down the curtain with a quick wrap-up session. Overall, it was an amazing 3.5 hours I had invested this week. This event helped me to network with interesting minds like Parashuram, HimaBindu and others.

-- Varun