Today wraps up Interop Las Vegas, and the cloud computing content. It was a busy week — and if the increase in attendance and conferences was any indicator, the IT industry is on its way to a healthy recovery.

We ran several events at Interop, and I’ve embedded the slides for each presentation here.

On Monday, we had the second annual Enterprise Cloud Summit, with over 300 folks in attendance. We had panels from providers, technology companies, and end users, as well as presentations on big data and the state of the cloud market.

Here’s my opening remarks deck:

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If you’ve read Nic Carr’s book The Big Switch, you’ll have heard the analogy that cloud computing is like eletricity: we’re moving from computers to computing, just as we moved from generators to generation.

Certainly, clouds and electricity have a lot in common. They’re elastic, because you can change your demand and pay for what you use. They power other things, whether those things are stoves or web applications. And they’re ubiquitous, blending into the everyday until we take them for granted.

Lately, I’ve been using a different analogy, and it’s working pretty well. I think clouds are like airlines.

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One of the best takeaways from Tuesday’s Writing Code for Many Clouds session was Sam Ramji (of Sonoa Systems) ’s ten tips for a platform agnostic approach to cloud development (based on his experiences creating apigee):

1. Get comfortable with virtualization

This means both your developers and your admins.

2. Limit dependency on provider specific APIs

This is how you avoid lock-in.

3. Refuse to use unique services

In other words, use abstraction layers like RightScale or even better, the open source libcloud – so you don’t have to write infrastructure level handles yourself, leaving your developers free to focus on building your application.

4. There are no SLAs on your provider’s APIs.

Build that into your design. Handle failure gracefully.

5. Understand the different strengths of different clouds.

For example, Amazon may be better for scalability, or Rightscale may be better for control over networking topology.

6. Anticipate your needs for data replication and design accordingly

You’re putting data all in one place – a worldwide singleton of data – but what about if you’re using multiple clouds, what goes where?

7. Pay attention to network topology and networking requirements

For example, you can’t do multicasting with amazon, so apigee used another product called VPNcubed – giving service across Rackspace and Amazon. This is closely related to the data replication consideration.

8. Consider the granularity of the requests that you will load balance

API level granularity makes your ability to run on multiple clouds much greater

9. You’ll still overbuy compute power

You still have to tell Amazon ahead of your need. But the waste ratio is less, and the racking and stacking problem is gone.

10. Monitor the monitors!

There are no SLAs on your APIs so you should have at least one box to monitor your monitor.

Another highlight of the Cloud Development track was Jinesh Varia (of Amazon Web Services) ’s excellent session on Design Patterns for Cloud Architecture. He has written a whitepaper on this, and his slides will be available soon.

The first set of keynotes at the first ever Cloud Connect conference took place this morning, two fast-paced sessions with thirteen presenters having ten minutes each. Here’s a summary of ten takeaway messages from the the event (including the interesting stats on the cloud adoption shown right):

1) Cloud computing is the grey matter of our distributed nervous system.

Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent) opened with a look at “clouds and crowds”. He explained that cloud computing is just the next step in a timescale of human evolution that began with farming and irrigation and brought us the industrial revolution and electricity in every home. Now that we are sharing more and more and living online, cloud computing is the enabler for a distributed human consciousness.

2) Cloud computing accelerates the supra-national evolution of the Internet.

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Opened up the Clouds and Performance workshop today at Cloud Connect. My first time using Prezi for a presentation; it’s an interesting, albeit different, way to convey information.

In a few weeks, we’ll hold the inaugural Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California. It’s actually the continuation of a series of events David Berlind launched around cloud computing, plus a spinoff of last year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit, plus a bunch of new content.

We’re pretty excited, because this is the first time Bitcurrent has helped build an event from scratch (unless you count Bitnorth, that is, but Cloud Connect is a beast of a different magnitude.) There are four days of content, built around three audiences: those who buy and finance cloud decisions; those who build cloud applications, and those who have to run the cloud platforms.

Getting here has been an interesting experience. Here’s what we did, plus an easter egg for reading all the way to the end. Read the rest of this entry »