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.
CloudCamp was a separate event from the conference, presented by CloudCamp.org, hosted and sponsored by The Open Group. It was well attended, with many people from the local IT community drawn to it to discuss the latest developments in Cloud Computing. It was ably facilitated by Larry Carvalho of RobustCloud on behalf of the CloudCamp organization.
Cloud Computing is becoming a mature and well understood technology. This was reflected in the nature of the discussions at this meeting. In early CloudCamps, the participants were mainly concerned to learn what cloud is and how to take the first steps in experimenting with it and using it. This time, it was clear that most people had passed that stage. They were more concerned with understanding the benefits and disadvantages of different kinds of cloud provider, with the changing relationship between development and operations (as exemplified by the emerging concept of DevOps), and with new ideas on gaining value from the cloud, such as for example the use of automatically gathered data-analytics information to scale the resources deployed.
At CloudCamps, the information content comes from the participants, and the quality of the event depends very much on who is there. The participants at this meeting were communicative and well-informed, as you would expect in Austin, and there were excellent and lively discussions.
