Floating around the cloud for one day - CloudCamp ,Bangalore

I attended the Bangalore CloudCamp that happened on 28th Feb 2010.In contrast to what I thought about it didn't take much time to find and reach the place (Dayananda Sagar Institutions,Kumaraswamy Layout) and the turn around of large no of attendees was also above my expectation.I saw lot of guys actively looking for what is happening in and around the cloud and how it is going to change the IT atmosphere.This has to be looked into when there are opinions from many corners that cloud is going to be another big hype rather than reality (a cloud without rain !).I assume there were around 200 no of attendees.

Talking about the sessions,it was a meet-up along with Hadoop summit organised by yahoo.being a developer I have the opinion that large conference add less value to the developer than small meet-ups.Organised conferences have a pre-planned set of talks and in that they will try to pour in everything within few minutes of time.It might help to get a broad overview about some topic and will especially help business guys to get a advertisement also.Whereas small meet-ups are developer friendly and you have more freedom and time to spend and space for participation.

Talking in this context the lightning sessions which grabbed most of the morning time was mainly a waste of time for me.But I understand it from the organiser's perspective that they have no choice as to support the sponsors. It all started with the un-conferencing session were some panellists chosen from the audience answered questions from audience and based on interest for a particular topic un-conference sessions were chosen.This was special with active participation of attendees.The un-conferencing sessions were scheduled parallel to the hadoop sessions in the afternoon in three separate classrooms and there was lunch break.

There were 9 un-conference sessions altogether.Let me list down them .

1) Intro to cloud computing
2) Session on Windows azure
3) Data management in cloud
4) Business models on cloud
5) Security in cloud
6) Apache mahout session
7) Google app-engine session
8) SDLC for cloud
9) Databases in cloud

I wanted to understand hadoop and at the same time interested in some un-conferencing sessions also and I have to schedule my time effectively as they are going in parallel.Finally I decided to attend the Apache Mahout session only in un-conference as it felt something interesting for me.Apache mahout is a Machine Learning software built on top of hadoop and lucence .Although I missed some initial hadoop sessions because of this mahout session was worth attending and Robin done a good job by presenting it in more effective way.

When I moved to hadoop after the Mahout session the initial sessions were over and there were not much interesting afterwards as it was more about QA and performance tuning and one session from professor from PSG college on how they used hadoop in their research.I appreciate the collaboration from the industry and academia in this area and have the opinion that that is one of the are India have to improve upon.The event was sponsored by Yahoo and Microsoft and it is great to see the commitment of yahoo in Hadoop open source project and yahoo proved that hadoop is worth and production ready as they are already running hadoop in more than 30000 nodes as the back-end of their web application infrastructure.Bear with me if I am biased being an open source advocate,but Microsoft's participation was targeted for their advertisement rather than interest in community and they tried to utilize it very well.The final panel discussion with industry pioneers had very short and so couldn't raise to the expectation .Even though there were some good thoughts and good participation from audience.

In summary it was a great effort to boost the community around the cloud in India and Prem did a good job in organising this and Dave Nielsen as cool and jovial guy managed sessions very well.Overall it was very particular with active participation of the cloud community in India.