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.