Tonight I attended the CloudCamp London event – having not managed to make the previous one I was keen to make the effort. It takes a bit of effort to rock up for an evening event after a day in the office, but there’s always the beer and pizza as an incentive…
The lightning talks ranged from IPv4 address exhaustion, EU data protection considerations, some PaaS evangelism, and the disruptive effects of cloud computing on existing sales channels/VARs. But it was the ‘un’-panel session that provided the most interest for me. These can be a little bit painful as the contributors are sometimes pretty random/self-selecting – but some key themes and news/observations emerged:
- There was a significant amount of AWS bashing going on. I’ve seen this before at CloudCamp, but the onesidedness of it surprised me (perhaps I should have spoken up?). In the spirit of full disclosure, Smart421 is an AWS Solution Provider so we’ve got a strong interest here – but it seemed to me that many people were holding AWS up as the market leader/innovater in the IaaS space but then taking cheap shots at them at the same time. I guess this is just human nature – we all naturally favour the underdog and take pot shots at the big boys. Historically this has been IBM or Microsoft, and now it’s AWS or Google. What I wondered was how many people in the room actually made their living because of the market that AWS has partially created via their innovation…
- There was quite a bit of discussion about who the eventual winners might be in the “cloud wars”, and also about how much it would depend on scale (i.e. can only huge companies win). My conclusion was that whilst scale will be a barrier to smaller organisations entering the market (as they won’t be able to drive the same levels of economy of scale), it won’t prevent innovative new businesses from gaining traction, i.e. AWS, Force.com etc all need to continue to offer compelling functionality, service levels and pricing and if they fail to do so, someone else will.
- The general view about cloud adoption in the UK seemed very depressing – it was generally agreed that the cloud world is very US West coast-centric and one representative from a UK organisation explained that they had explicitly set up a Silicon Valley presence just because they felt they were at a competitive disadvantage otherwise. A significant part of this US advantage was felt to be due to raw entrepreneurial spirit – whereas in the UK if you create a start-up you are usually viewed as mad. No one seemed to have a specific answer about how the UK could catch up, despite the fact that we have good skills available to us, and even more depressingly some panel lists expressed the view that organisations in mainland Europe was less risk averse than those in the UK and therefore adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud computing more quickly.
- And finally some news that I hadn’t picked up on – Google App Engine put up their prices recently and users of the PaaS platform just had to “lump it” – some experiencing huge relative cost increases, e.g. 50-100%. This is tied to moving from being a “preview” platform.
PS I’d just like to finish by thanking National Express for running such a shoddy train service that I’ve been able to usefully spend the 70 freakin’ minutes (and counting) that I’ve been sitting stationary on a train in the middle of nowhere to write this blog post.
October 6, 2011 at 11:42 am
Beer and pizza is always an incentive for me to attend technical user group events!
Out of interest how did the community rate Microsoft’s participation in the cloud space, and what was their thinking and experiences to which type of cloud offering is going to be the most popular or most interest; SaaS, PaaS, IaaS?
Let me know the next event, I’ll see if I can attend.
–
Simon
October 7, 2011 at 7:49 am
Although in the blog post I mention some AWS bashing going on – Microsoft Azure was not mentioned much but when it was it was in hushed tones like it was a dirty pair of words, but a bit tongue in cheek. Google also got a bit of a kicking re the GAE price changes. CloudCamp is a very techy/developer-focused community and so there tends to be a strong “beat up the big boys” mentality – which is fine, it’s refreshing to have that challenge against the mega-steam-rolling marketing machines of the big players.
With regards to the popularity of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS – if there’s one thing the cloud computing world is not short of, it’s generalisations. So one presentation was about why PaaS is the future (and it’s fine to evangelise IMHO, we all need a bit of that!), whereas in reality it’s more a of greyscale – IaaS has great use cases (e.g. porting something to a cheaper, more scalable architecture when you have no intention of rewriting it), PaaS also (e.g. a greenfield app development when you can live with a bit less control in exchange for high levels of abstraction from the underlying platform) and SaaS (e.g. anything commodity/non-differentiating really). So as always, it’s horses for courses. But if you go to CloudCamp, you tend to get a more polarised view – depending on what people are working on/selling (IaaS/PaaS or SaaS) – they see the cloud market through that prism. Human nature I guess.
I’ll send round the next CloudCamp invite – defintiely worth going – you’ll enjoy it. Especialy if you like pictures of cats (that’ll make sense if you go!)