Gojko Adzic: CloudCamp London 2: private clouds and standardisation

The notes from CloudCamp London, courtesy of blogger, Gojko Adzic:

CloudCamp London 2: private clouds and standardisation

http://gojko.net/2008/11/14/cloudcamp-london-2-private-clouds-and-standardisation/

CloudCamp returned to London yesterday, organised with the help of Skills Matter at the Crypt on the Clarkenwell green. The main topics of this cloud/grid computing community meeting were service-level agreements, connecting private and public clouds and standardisation issues.

The meeting was again organised as a set of lightning talks followed by a few open space discussions, with Alexis Richardson working as a host and keeping track of time. The length of lightning talks was halved to five minutes, but Simon Wardley again achieved an amazing feat – going through seventy slides in just five minutes. (At the first CloudCamp in London, he ran through a hundred slides in ten minutes). His talk was again a pleasure to watch, although it was mostly centred around the same issues as the last time: standards and avoiding a vendor lock-in. Trying to describe the risks involved in a vendor lock-in, he talked about a scenario when one company buys a huge number of machines, another provides a cloud on top of that, the third provides virtualisation to split the cloud into a number of “small” machines, fourth builds applications on top of that, fifth provides services based on those applications and so on. If the company that owns the hardware goes bust, the whole pyramid will collapse, affecting thousands of small companies that actually run applications on the fifth and sixth levels. He could not resist making a joke about sub-prime mortgage market, comparing this situation to one bank having a lot of houses, another packaging that into a financial instrument, third splitting that into lots of small instruments and so on. As a way to avoid system failure, Wardley again asked for more standardisation between vendors.

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