So that's an unconference....

I attended the CloudCamp event in London last Thursday night. Here are my thoughts:

i) Between 600 and 700 attendees. I think those kinds of numbers show that it's not really correct to view cloud as fringe or up and coming - it's here and it's real. Not everyone was there just for the free beer and pizza ;-)

ii) It was not simply vendors pitching to vendors. The Enterprise Cloud discussion track after the lightning talks clearly included attendees from large organisations either already doing cloud or in the process of considering cloud. One example was that of an investment bank who run their Monte Carlo simulations in the cloud.

iii) Nice thing about the event - vendor pitches are banned. Some of the lightning talks came perilously close but the lack of blatent pitches in the discussion tracks made for a better quality of discussion.

iv) Some interesting topics covered in the cloud talks around federation, particularly regarding http://www.arjuna.com/agility and http://bitbucket.org/dotcloud/dotcloud/wiki/Home (the latter being academic and open sourcey at present but interesting nonetheless).

v) The fate of Coghead - http://www.coghead.com/ - vividly demonstrates the dangers of SaaS vendor lock-in. If you're going to do cloud you're probably better going lower down in the the stack to IaaS where there is less lock-in. (It should be easier to migrate your Linux VM plus hosted apps in multiple clouds than moving your Force.com or GoogleApps proprietary assets!).

vi) It's not just vendor lock-in to worry about - you also need to consider data lock-in. What happens when you have so much data in the cloud that you can't get it back out again? For example, you may have insufficient local storage or insufficient bandwidth to extract the data in the required timeframe. Interesting problem, possibly an argument for distributing storage amongst different clouds so that you don't amass too much in one place - but this does cause other issues. This is the kind of problem that makes this cloud stuff so much fun!