BarCamp7 on Cloud Computing

This saturday is the most expected BarCamp7 @ Amazon campus. ‘Most expected’ because the session was code-named ‘computing on cloud 9’ and also because I attended last week’s session on Cloud Computing @ HYSEA.

Contrary to last week, I felt the audience reaction this week was like this:

Supposed to be demo-packed, the sessions are either incomplete (thanks to the bad internet connectivity) or completely DOS-based command line views...pfff! An important feedback for every organizer of such (barcamp-like) workshops/sessions - please arrange reasonable internet connectivity so both presenters and viewers can have a good experience!

An overview of the complete session is time-lined by Ramesh here (one of these days, I should also try live-blogging, he he). I would like to pick up more off-beat information on the sessions.

Hadoop: Jothi from Yahoo gave a presentation on this software layer on commodity machines. He started with an introduction on grid computing, made an age-old statement that ‘hardware is expensive’ (not exactly a reason to go for cloud computing), and moved on to a non-demo presentation of the framework which is intended to solve problems faced in grid computing. The presentation made me think that ‘thick client’ applications alone can be written, still, Hadoop is surely something to look out for. Especially it being open-source and as Jothi states ‘security is not an issue’, it could surely bring smiles to the developer community. At least it did when he credited Google and its MapReduce algo which is used extensively in Hadoop :-). More than the complete presentation, a picture of their data center (20 or so rows, 5+ stacks...) is enough 1000 words to explain the seriousness! Want to do Hadoop projects? Check out here!

Google App Engine: Anirudh gave us a (yet another) Hello World demo (internally, it is using yet another markup language – YAML & Python) using the App Engine, which is the infrastructure for building applications over the cloud. Calling this the (yet another) ‘next evolution in computing’, the demo was more an application demo, and not much on the infrastructure behind it, as Google App Engine was detailed last Saturday itself. The demo was really ‘techie’ right from command line.

DataDirect OpenAccess – T sales force demo from Mateen showed mof Microsoft Access + Crystal reports and less SalesForce – that you really don’t need to know SalesForce, worry only about your work. The demo is a typical example of SaaS consumption.

AMLOCK – Anup presented on re-engineering amlock for multi-tenancy. This is an example for not owning a solution (cost of ownership) and still hosting it. The presentation is a typical problem-solution based approach.

Using EC2 – Narayana from a start-up company Zveego, showed a command line based demo on virtualized, persistent data storage. It is good to see how EC2 is really easy to create a server machine in just few minutes, and host a web site onto it. It is really a pity when he said ‘google is killing us’ - Zveego has a product which is very much like MapMaker.

BPM on-demand – A demo by Jayaprakash from Cordys is more about the Process Factory and how process centric web applications can be developed. If not for the poor internet connectivity, this would have been a complete demo on business processing online. MashApps is an interesting new term now coined by the Process Factory which is something to watch!

P2W2 – This is from a startup, and the demo shown by Chaitanya is really cool. He showed a tool that recorded the voice and had voice editing options which are no match to any voice editing tools available over the net! The demo is about their online marketplace for services.

Tell-a-friend on the cloud – Given by Hrish from Pramati, his ‘word-of-the-mouth’ marketing tool is an embeddable widget which can be used to tell a friend about your blog or anything you did over the web. There is less about the tool and more about Pramati’s various DB scaling techniques already discussed last week.

LootStreet – This is an out-and-out start-up company by 2 guys from Ahmedabad (2008 passed-outs!!!) with a caption ‘every price is negotiable’. Introducing real e-commerce in India, their solutions are (in their own term) rudimentary communication of shopping over the internet. Surely, start-ups such as this (immediately after graduation) were never thought of in India in 2000 (that’s when I joined the tech world), which shows India is growing, and growing faster.

Acuvate – This is another start-up, and the presenter, Hitesh, just introduced his company as the next dimension of PaaS.

The BarCamp concluded with Map-Reduce algorithm show by Suganth.

On a ‘feedback’ish note, every such session organizers have to ensure the coffee machines are kept well away from presentations. They were louder than the presenters :-)

Cloud Computing Workshop @ HYSEA

It takes an effort in the form of a Workshop on a pleasant Saturday morning and a couple of friend’s company to wake a guy like me from a long slumber and bring me back to blogging!

India’s First Ever Workshop on Cloud Computing was conducted by HYSEA @ Google Campus on Saturday.

Instead of talking about the complete workshop, I would like to pick up a few sessions to feel the overall experience. Though all sessions were good, here is what I felt the crowd reaction was:

Yes, a perfect Bell Curve, where there was a lot of applauds in the middle, when there was Microsoft’s demo of the Live Mesh.

MSV Janakiramm started with a suggestion of calling SaaS as “Storage as a Service”, had his talk centered on Cloud Computing for Consumers. Particularly, the demo was very interesting and kept captivated till the end. You can look and try the mesh live, which was very recently launched in India. Nice to think (from his own words) Windows Update as a Cloud Service :-)

Saji Antony from Cordys talked about Cordys's Limited BETA product “The Process Factory” (BPM On-Demand), which was the other demo-based session yesterday, although this one was recorded. The crowd felt the slow but sure change from Mash-Ups to Mash-Apps happening in the web.

There was equal amount of excitement for the MyPicks web application built on Facebook. The one by Rajiv Shivane from Pramati started with the challenges on computing over the Cloud, then came to the biggest challenge in IT – how to scale up your DB. This talk was full of information on the best possible (although called unorthodox across the world) ways to scale up your database.

From the other sessions, there are few munchies to remember:

1. Animoto - Considered to be the beginning of the end of slide sharing, gets you a nice music video from your images and pictures. Their users just shot up from 25k to 250k in just 3 days!

2. Ooyala – (Also a video technology company) is one among the very few software companies started working without a server. A nice example for a server-less software start-ups.

3. TimesMachine – Pretty known and old, but popular digital magazine from Times NY. You can read almost any (Times) news – even the history.

4. GrepTheWeb – An initiative from Amazon using Hadoop from AWS.

5. Heard about Google’s GQL? It’s just another attempt to create a generic (??) SQL interface for Linux and Unix platforms.

The biggest challenge with Cloud Computing in my opinion is in its validity and usage by large enterprises. Questions like storing my own data on a server of some service provider and the IP security and its safety will be large as you go on your journey in building the enterprise (though maybe not foreseen initially). Cloud Computing is yet to be governed and made clear as it is still in its nascent stage.

Anyway, there is something coming up on the same next week in Bar Camp 7. Let’s see.