kief.com

Sporadically delivered thoughts on Continuous Delivery

Cloud Camp London

| Comments

I went to last night’s London CloudCamp, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I’m not going to go into pontifications about cloud computing - I think it’s a brilliant concept, not mature yet, and an excellent option for online service startups.

A few random notes from the Camp:

I enjoyed Neil Bartlett’s lightning talk about OSGi and the Cloud. I’m gearing up for an OSGi pilot project at the moment, and am hoping to attend Neil’s course at Skills Matter next week, but hadn’t thought through the usefulness of OSGi in a cloud. Given that getting the full value out of a cloud infrastructure means being able to rapidly and automatically provision an arbitrary number of servers, and then keep them all updated, this is a natural fit. It’s a shame he didn’t manage to finish in 5 minutes.

My notes are poor, but I think it was a guy from Qwest Software who did an excellent job of making a very key point for people hoping to move their company onto a cloud infrastructure. In brief, you are not going to get the approval from the C?Os unless you can prove that it will be cheaper than your current infrastructure. And you can’t do that if you can’t tell them how much your current infrastructure currently costs in the same terms as the Cloud, i.e. how much does it cost to add a new service, including not just hardware and vendor costs but the support and other costs that go along with it. He asked how many people in the room can identify that cost with their current infrastructure right now, and I didn’t see anyone raise their hand. Hmm.

I was amused when they took a voice vote on the number of people planning to attend each of the breakout sessions. It sounded like there were about the same number of people going to ‘Open Cloud’ as going to ‘Enterprise Cloud’, but the latter group sounded much less enthusiastic.

Comments