Reporting from CloudCamp Auckland – “CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”
Questions from the floor about Cloud Computing…
What is the Value? – CloudBreak was involved in the New Zealand Post Google apps implementation. For them it’s about value – NZ Post discovered hard savings of $500k per annum by moving to a Google email infrastructure.
Why develop in the clouds? – Gen-i talked about the development benefits of a cloud dev environment – allows for rapid A/B testing and means that a business is used to thinking in terms of integration – the use of APIs and the like. To make the decision though metrics are needed for current costs – to make an informed decision based purely on ROI is difficult.
What shortages does New Zealand need to overcome? We suffer from latency, the speed of light cannot be sped up. Need local cloud hosting offerings in order to remove this problem. Local companies need to develop with a global perspective and ambition.
Tools and techniques for highly variable load? James Valentine from Fronde has recently been using EC2 for a client. He contends that PaaS is cheap but tends to be inflexible, force.com will shut off service once API limits have been breached – ensure you chose the correct platform based on where the bulk will be – page impressions? processing cycles? storage?
There were murmurings of discontent from the audience about the lack of focus on value proposition around cloud computing – hopefully later sessions will address those concerns.
