Bob McWhirter by far gave the best keynote session I’ve seen yet. His delivery is humorous, he’s got great stage presence, and the slides were very creative. Furthermore, he was best able to give me an understanding on what the hell the cloud is anyway.
The cloud is the next logical step in application delivery.
First, we jammed some servers in some closets.
Then we did some colo.
After that, we leased some managed servers.
With the cloud, we lease what appears to be servers.
The Cloud Computing Stack
Software as a Service (SaaS) – Abstracts software
Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Abstracts Services
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Abstracts Hardware
Tenets of the Cloud
- Illusion of Infinite Resources
- On Demand Acquisition and Provisioning
- Someone Else’s Responsibility
Virtualization makes it affordable to make mistakes. Repeatedly.
The network isn’t all that slow, compared to spinning disks.
Messaging (REST-MQ)
Scheduling
Security & Identity (OASIS)
Computation (Query and otherwise)
Transaction (REST-TX)
BPM
Telephony
It’s a stack of services, instead of a stack of software.
More info at http://cloudpress.org