It’s a day packed with keynotes, panels and shmoozing, with some topics overlapping with Velocity; yet at a much higher level. We’ve alternated between interesting panels (”Harnessing explosive growth”) where the key points are:
- a proper architecture lets you scale [much like in traditional building]
- build kill switches in all your features
- get operations and development on a symbiotic relationship [salesforce and amazon do it]
Some other panels are clearly more about pushing your product (”The race to the next database”). The topic of processing data (possibly in the cloud) is of course crucial yet very few concerns around switching costs, security and privacy are addressed. My take on this is that if you need to run analytics on your data sets and said data sets are huge, you need compute to be close (from a network distance perspective) to your data. Which means that your data must be in the cloud. While I’m reluctant to go down that route right now, Greg Papadopoulos @sun made the compelling analogy that money storage is delegated to reputable third-parties (called banks) so data are likely to follow the same treatment, i.e. the cloud is likely to become the most secure place to store data (or most resilient with an acceptable security policy). Sun’s interesting take on cloud computing is Project Caroline, where infrastructure, including network bits, is driven by code, in a way, that’s presumable a bit cleaner than EC2 (which is quite bare).
Dr. Vogel’s presentation @amzn, was inspiring despite containing basically little new information but fits well into this type of conference, which act as reinforcement devices to jumpstart a new industry.
Live coverage is at gigaom.
