CloudCamp Toronto – April 6, 2010

I had the opportunity to attend my third Toronto CloudCamp event last night. There was a good turnout of about 100 people who came together to talk about cloud and the issues that organizations face in adopting and using cloud.

Overall the event was quite good. I found the breakout sessions to be the most valuable, because you have a chance to discuss a specific topic in more detail with a smaller group of people who are more interested and active in that particular aspect of cloud.

I participated in two breakout sessions that are relevant to the cloud activities we see here at Platform Computing. Here are my thoughts and perspectives on the topics and the discussions.

Session 1 - - Porting applications to the cloud

Like all of the sessions, this was suggested by someone in the audience who was interested in a deeper discussion about the challenges in moving traditional/legacy applications into a cloud model. From what we at Platform have seen in the market, this is one of the key challenges enterprises face in moving forward with cloud adoption. Many organizations start with a simple non-production cloud environment for Dev/Test, but the real ‘fun’ begins as they define a cloud strategy that supports complex production application environments. In our experience, understanding the needs of the application and balancing that with the management of resource supply are key to building an effective cloud.

Session 2 - ROI that organizations can expect to achieve from the cloud

This is another hot topic for organizations as they evaluate their cloud options. The promise of shifting capital expenditures to operating expenses by using a public cloud is one that intrigues many end-user organizations but has some challenges. The ability to dial-up and down their infrastructure based on business demand is a key value that end-users see in the cloud, along with the increased agility of being able to tap into resources as they need them. From a customer perspective, we see internal IT organizations working to provide these services to end users within their organization by building private clouds. This allows the enterprise to gain the cost benefit of a shared infrastructure while maintaining control and meeting end-user agility needs. Many organizations that we have dealt with particularly with a history in grid computing (large scale compute intensive processing) can achieve the necessary economies of scale and sharing within their own private cloud environment.

All in all, CloudCamp continues to be a good event to get a wider community perspective on cloud and cloud adoption. I look forward to participating in future events and getting to the next level of deeper discussions within the community.