I went to the cloud computing / gaming conference yesterday

1) the organisers where shocked by the turn out - 150 attendees -  they where only expecting 50

2) lots of gambling / spreadbetting people there

3) Most / all products talked about where focused to the high throughput requirements of gaming platforms. Most of them are java based - focus is on storing data in memory and persisting to db asynchronously (see gigaspaces)

4) Met various people - including Simon Wardley at Canonical (ubuntu) - his talk was amazing - will send you link to video when its up

"Cloud computing is a consequence of economic and technical conditions that have combined to cause a disruptive change in IT towards a service based economy."

5) linked to about 6 people on linkedin  - one person might be looking for video ads work and other is a Serbian gaming developer consultant

6) introduced yet another person to Roy at shinyads

7)

  •     EC computing allows little guys to take on big guys.
  •     EC computing - even for 50 machines is cheaper than having an IT manager in your company.
  •     Important to manage expectations with business when saying we are moving to cloud - because its all new
  •     Demand to read the full SLA when moving to cloud computing
  •     Many people are concerned about actual failover that amazon has (not enough colos)
  •     Looks like amazon EC's api will become the standard api - Ubuntu is pushing a open source version of EC called Eucalyptus
  •     Be careful what prepackaged instances you will use on EC - some of them have alpha versions of code (eg. java7 and tomcat)
  •     Some gaming companies store their data in Gibraltar and use amazon EC in Ireland for processing (some latency concerns).
  •     For most companies where the data is stored has legal issues - eg. US laws vs EU laws
  •     Someone quoted 4 months at a mobile operator project to get hardware requisitioned (load testing, product purchase codes etc) vs could have used EC in 10 min - the service wasn't that popular when it went live. One person quoted cost  $90 on EC vs $700k(using internal hardware)
  • Some gambling companies use the cloud to absorb peak load - for example just before a horse race and use existing hardware for normal day-to-day operations

8) interesting Akamai will not accept egaming companies - Some companies are using Amazon Cloudfront (Amazons CDN)

9) RabbitMQ - open source async message broker built in erlang - has one user soocial.com ... - an address book syncing tool - how origional

10) Chris Anderson - the guy who wrote the long tail book (and invented the term) - has a new book out now called free (I blogged about this book 1 year ago)

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

"Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)"