I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to post about the amazing CloudCamp Silicon Valley event we held a couple of weeks ago. But there’s no better time than the present, especially since it gives me a chance to plug next week’s CloudCamp Chicago.

CloudCamp Silicon Valley was held at Sun’s executive briefing center in Menlo Park on September 30th. The EBC is an amazing facility; thanks again to Sun for hosting us. We had more than 10 rooms filled to capacity with more than 150 people discussing various aspects of cloud computing. In fact, due to strong interest in the event a good number of walk-ins we found ourselves pushing the limits of the Menlo Park fire code. We may need to pony up for a door man/bouncer at the next event. :-)

The event took on the traditional CloudCamp “un-conference” approach, with attendees driving the discussion by posting topics to the board. We had really strong participation and the board filled up quickly. There were a handful of slots open at the end, so I volunteered to facilitate two topics I thought would be of interest. The first was a session on “What is Cloud Computing?” targeted at those new to the field. The second was a more advanced topic on cloud application development: what it means, how it’s different, and what enterprise developers – Java and .Net – need to do to fully leverage cloud environments.

Defining the Cloud

About 25 CloudCampers joined me to explore what cloud computing really is. It was a highly interactive session (as most camp discussions are) where we talked about different approaches to cloud computing. In the end, the group consensus lined-up very well with the approach I’ve been advocating here on my blog (see especially the Blind Men and the Cloud post), that is, that trying to define cloud based on the technologies used to enable it doesn’t capture the full promise of cloud, and that the best way to define cloud computing is in terms of the set of characteristics each of us is trying to achieve with it. Some of the essential cloud characteristics we came up with in the session were:

A Heated Debate on Cloud Application Development

The second session I led was around cloud application development. There were about 20 or so very technical participants crammed into a relatively small room, many standing, and we ended up having a very lively discussion about software development in the age of the cloud. I took a show-of-hands survey at the start of the session and the group’s primary focus was on achieving scalability for their cloud applications, as opposed to simply trying to outsource the ownership and management of servers to a third party. (Not a surprising finding for a group of developers.)

There was a bit of a split in the group between whether cloud application development was, in fact, different than traditional application development at all, or if it was just more of the same. Many of those in the room felt that developing for the cloud required a different approach so that applications could take advantage of the resources the cloud made available. A couple of folks took the position that cloud development wasn’t really any different. (Chris Richardson did a great job of challenging the notion that a new approach was needed). I think the unifying idea between both positions is that cloud development necessitates the best practices that people have been talking about for a long time. Developing applications that can truly scale in the cloud depends on writing loosely coupled, highly modular code and being careful about the way state is managed. For more on this topic see the Guerry’s great series of posts on “Is your code cloud-ready and multi-core friendly?” (Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Atomicity, Part 3: Statelessness, Part 4: Idempotence, with more to come)

Finally, the exceptional turnout also gave us the opportunity to more formally ask about the industry issues on the minds of CloudCamp participants. Appistry partnered with Cloud Camp to sponsor the first-ever Cloud Camp attendee survey. We’re in the process of tabulating the responses and will highlight some of them in upcoming posts. We’ll continue to sponsor these surveys to help the community enhance its understanding of cloud computing in the market.