18 Jun 09 CloudCamp Barcelona 2009

Last Monday took place in Barcelona the first CloudCamp ever done in the city. Altough I was expecting more technical stuff it was good to be there and listen to what people have to say.
The first part of the event consisted of some quick explanations from different companies related with cloud computing. Basically, were explaining the cloud choises and advantages they were offering. The one I enjoyed the most was the Abiquo’s presentation of their new software, Abicloud. Through a really nice GUI developed with Flex, Abicloud, among other stuff, allows you to set up virtual machines configuring automatically an apache server, mysql database… with just a few drag & drop actions. You can use you own machines, servers from an ISP or even combine both. Elastically, you can increase or decrease the number of virtual machines. This can be very convenient for sites with hight traffic peaks or testing environements.
I am not going to talk more about it as with a five minutes presentation just could get the main idea. Can’t wait to have some free time to start playing with it. Just will add that Abicloud is completely open source.

After the quick talks, the following topics were discussed:

• What guarantees do I have with Cloud Computing?
• What legal issues are there with your data?
• Are standards important? If so, wich ones?
• What is the benefit for a company with only a few dozens of servers?
• Best platfrom to starting a cloud hosting company?
• Is cloud computing green? If so, what?

In the end people were divided in groups depending on in wich topic wanted to go deeper. I attended to “How to develope applications that are going to run in the cloud”. There I could have an interesting quick chat about application scalability and how to dump mysql databases to HDFS using the Cloudera’s tool Sqoop.

Tags: Abicloud, Cloud computing, CloudCamp, Events, Hadoop, MySQL, Open source, Sqoop