CloudCamp London

I'm on my way back from CloudCamp London. The event was very impressive and I had lot of fun (not only because of the beer and the pizza…)
To be honest, I did not imagine that there will be over 250 people in the room, I guess cloud is one of the hottest topics out there today.

My humbled contribution was a short session about challenges when scaling data-intensive transactional/statefull applications in the cloud (the video is available here).
When dealing with this class of applications the bottleneck is not access to hardware and memory on-demand, nor the need for scalable deployment tools, but rather the architecture itself.

Traditional tier-based middleware simply does not allow scalability on-demand in a linear manner. This present a barrier for applications to truly leverage the power of the cloud.
Sound complex to solve? it is :) , but GigaSpaces scale-out application server, packaged for the cloud comes to the rescue.

We were able to demonstrate the above as well the powerful notion of cloud portability using a live demo with our good partners from CohesiveFT whom we've just announced a partnership with. Thanks Ben! we all know how live demos in events is a risky business :)

Thanks for Adam Vile and his team from Excelian for demonstrating how simple it was to develop a GigaSpaces-based Mote Carlo Simulation on EC2. "We've just followed your Wiki" as they told us.

I've learned that the data-intensive transactional class of application no longer relates to “those fortune 500 enterprise”, this becomes a common challenge for small startups as well.
The cloud is actually one of the important reasons for that as it provides a cost-effective scalable infrastructure which enables small and medium vendors to offer reacher and more performance demanding functionality to their users.

I also learned that the idea of cloud portability makes a lot of sense. People would like to have the freedom of using their cloud vendor of choice according to their specific needs, without changing their application when moving between clouds.

This was music to my ears, as I believe Gigaspaces cloud Application Server offers an elegant solution to both of these issues.

Looking forward for the next event, Reuven and Alexis, thanks for inviting me.