Review of first CloudCamp Berlin

As announced i took part in the first instance of a CloudCamp in Berlin last thursday. While originally intended for tech-savvy people i had the impression that there were many folks from the management as well.

The first thing to notice is the different perception of the term “Cloud Computing” among the crowd as well as the speakers. The speaker who is most consistent with my view was Niko Nelissen of Sun. Niko described these architectural service layers of Cloud Computing:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In my opinion this is the broadest and most appropriate notion of Cloud Computing. All other speakers defined Cloud Computing as a subpart of these layers.

Eventually the speeches were of different quality. They were arranged as lightning talks, so no pitching allowed and only five minutes to talk per speaker. I had the impression that some guys have stripped down their usual presentation slides to exclude everything that smells like a product and talked about the rest of the slides. Usually there is not much information left in a marketing talk. So my advice would be that these guys should be allowed to pitch their product. By this the Google talk could have been interesting.
Otherwise there were some really good speeches. Morris Riedel of the Jülich Supercomputing Center summed up some important learnings of the GRID Computing community that could be helpful for early adopters of Cloud Computing. I also liked the talk by Scott Wheeler of Directed Edge, whose conclusion i did not get – but the overall talk was good.

As far as i can remember there were speakers from the following companies:

• Sun Microsystems
• Amazon Web Services
• CSC
• Google
• Zimory
• aiCache
• Directed Edge
• Jülich Supercomputing Center
• Thorleif of The unbelievable Machine Company

Overall the first CloudCamp Berlin was a good start and i’d like to see it repeat in the capital later this year!

More extensive reviews of the event in German can be found at gruenderszene.de and MashedUp.