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I spent a few days at the Gluecon conference in Boulder earlier this week. I attended the cloud computing conference as a guest presenter. I arrived a day ahead of time so that I could attend the Denver CloudCamp event.
I think Gluecon may be the best cloud computing conference in the U.S right now. And it’s not because of the session content — it’s the conference participants and networking opportunities. You’re basically mingling with a who’s who of people in the cloud space. Gluecon also provides a different perspective on the cloud than what I’ve seen at other conferences. Gluecon sessions and participants are mainly focused on cloud applications. Whereas sessions at conferences like Hostingcon or Vmworld are mainly focused on cloud computing infrastructure. At the end of the day it’s applications that are driving cloud architecture so this developer-centric perspective is an important one to hear.
My key takeaway from the conference was how cloud scale application development is fundamentally changing the technologies and tools developers use to create applications. Today’s developers are tasked with the job of building applications that will scale from one server to a thousand servers — from one phone to a million phones. That task requires new systems architectures and application designs. I especially enjoyed the sessions on topics like NoSQL, db sharding, and map/reduce. What a phenomenal time to be an application developer!
On a personal note I was able to spend some free time in the evenings to visit with friends and family in the area. It was great to see my close college buddy Derek and my aunt and uncle that live in Denver. Gluecon is at the top of my conference list in the future so hopefully I’ll see everyone again next year.
Our ReliaCloud development team launched our new partner portal system earlier this week. The new portal allows our channel partners to manage cloud services for their customers. Essentially our channel partners can now leverage our cloud infrastructure to build their own managed cloud service offerings.
We’re certainly not the first cloud provider to build this type of functionality. But we are still in the minority. I expect more cloud providers to offer partner tools in the future.
The guys at Vmops just changed their name to Cloud.com after buying the namesake domain. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with the Vmops team over the past 9 months as we have built out our ReliaCloud platform. I was pretty surprised about this announcement because I didn’t know that the cloud.com domain name was even for sale! Apparently they bought the domain from the guy that started Meetup. Talk about cashing in on a domain at the right time. With $17MM in new funding the Cloud.com guys certainly had some cash available to spend. I think this is a home run from a marketing standpoint.
