We attended CloudCamp Seattle on Saturday and participated in the first CloudCamp unconference to visit the emerald city.
Seattle is home to an impressive list of cloud computing companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s seattle campus), as well as a growing list of emerging startups (Decho, Skytap, and a plethora of SaaS companies). This makes Seattle a leading light for cloud innovation and CloudCamp attracted many of the Seattle tech community involved with cloud computing.
You can check out video footage from the event here.
A couple of observations from the event:
(1) Questions from the audience indicated there is increased enterprise interest in cloud computing and the need to understand compliance, security, and cloud architecture best practices
(2) One session focused on sharing experience and examples from attendees on the compelling use cases for the cloud today. This list included:
– Scientific and research calculations requiring massive compute
– Applications and services with unpredictable demand (e.g. online games, facebook apps, scalable web apps etc.)
– Virtual labs (development and test, training, demo environments etc.)
– Content storage and delivery
The use cases that had the most compelling business case had a need for (1) Short bursts of computing capacity and/or (2) Ability to scale quickly and cost effectively based on demand.
