Quick notes from yesterdays sessions

I realized I hadn't posted any specific posts about all the rest of the sessions yesterday. So here is a rather boring list of a things that stood out from those sessions:

Netflix is moving completely to Amazon's Cloud. Again, they take advantage of being able to bring up and shutdown instances as needed throughout the day. They run something called Chaos Monkey to test reliability and redundancy of their systems. It's designed to simulate all sorts of failures with their systems. Netflix runs this on their production environment!

There was a presentation on Cloud Economics. It is important to look at the the total cost, not just the unit cost. Don't expect unit cost to be cheaper in the cloud. The cloud makes the most sense economically when your needs flucturate. Clouds are agille, because you can spin up new instances in the cloud faster than you can purchase and install hardware. CFOs are interested in clouds, not only for the shift from CapEx, but also because it allows expenses to mirror demand much more closely.

Product presentations by Microsoft on Azure, Rackspace and Salesforce. They all looked good. Microsoft seems to be going after this area in a big way. They have spent billions building up infrastructure for Azure.

New term - Cloud Tenant -- Clients of cloud services.  Helps reinforce the concept of renting vs owning IT resources.

There was a session called Measuring and Managing Public Clouds. The government actually ahead of the curve on cloud computing.  They are working with companies to set standards for the industry. Most companies are still less than 50% virtualized.

There are difficulties of moving from in-house applications to cloud-based applications. The companies that had the most problems with Amazon's outage, were the the ones that hadn't written their applications with the cloud in mind. Applications make assumptions about environment that may not apply in cloud.

SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Servcie) -- what's the difference and which one is right for you?

The final session of the day was a customer panel. Here are some notes:
Using Amazon VPC services for VDI instances
Design apps for the cloud and elasticity
Still in early adoption phase
Despite problems a couple weeks ago, Amazon is a great service
Need more visibility and security.
Clouds today are certainly good enough for test and dev.