Cloud Camp Unconference Toronto 22 July 2009

We entered Mariott Hotel at around 5.10 , Just in time before the registrations , As expected Nitin dint forget to bring the registration printout and handed it over to the gentelman collecting them. Umasankar just joined us to try his luck and he was lucky enough to get a seat for the unconference.
On a side note I was pleasently surprised when the registration executive recognized my last name (Mysore) as name of a province in India.

We entered the unconference hall to find out it had not yet started. So we just got ourlseleves cup of coffee ( free if you are interested to know). There were some cakes and chocolate pasteries too.

At around 6.00PM the unconference started!!!

Our host for the evening was Dr Scott Radeztsky, He is an interesting speaker and indeed a subject matter expert. For those who don’t know him : Dr. Scott Radeztsky is the Chief Technologist for Sun's Systems Engineering organization in North and South America. He is one of Sun's 6 Principal Engineers, the author of the Sun Blueprint Book "N1 Grid: Preparing, Architecting and Implementing Service-centric Data Centers", and the Sun representative on the Open Group Board.



We all were asked to comeup with few interesting topics about cloud computing which would be discussed among ourselves in a sepearte room. Each room was going to have atleast one subject matter expert who would be steering the whole discussion (unconference). Well, I must say this was my first unconference and I was pretty much impressed with the whole unconference concept.

Nitin, Umasankar and I decided to attend the first session which was “what is cloud computing”. As stated by Scott on twitter he “enjoyed the first-timers in the "what is cloud computing" session...fundamentally questioning the "fundamentals”.
Yes , that’s what we all did , we questioned the fundamentals. Some of the questions were.

1) what is cloud computing ?
2) How different is it from distributed computing ?
3) Who are all the players in this field ?
4) What are the security and privacy issues in CC ?
5) Does it give unfair advantages to certain big players ?
6) How will it handle the “conflic of interest” if two major players monoplise different layers of cloud computing ?
7) What are the different grey ares between layers ?
8) How can we achieve Operating systems Virtualization or Hypervisor ?
Etc etc.

There were total of 8 sessions to know more about them please visit cloud camp wiki.

It was an excellent session according to all of us.

Next we attended Business Scenario Workshop by , this gave us a lot of practical knowledge about cloud computing and current pain points in IT industry.

Please read the blog by Sandy Kemsley to know more about this workshop.