On Sunday March 11th, I had the pleasure of attending CloudCamp in downtown Austin during SXSW. If you aren’t familiar with it, CloudCamp is an “unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” It was hosted by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), and was attended by a variety of vendors, cloud computing administrators, and folks like me who wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the complementary tool chains & use cases.
CloudCamp started off with a series of lightning talks – which are typically 5-7 minute mini-presentations. The goal is to quickly impart information and ideas to the audience without drowning them in PowerPoint or vendor jibber-jabber. I took a good deal of notes, and present one of the lightning talks below.
Ben Kepes – Breaking out of the Clouderati echo chamber
If you’ve been involved in the VMware, virtualization, or cloud communities on Twitter, no doubt you’ve heard of the “Clouderati”. According to Ben, the term first started as a joke and over time it stuck. The Clouderati consists of a Twitter list of roughly one to two hundred thought leaders on cloud computing and its various permutations & use cases. While the cloud discussions on Twitter can be very helpful & insightful, sometimes it can be a bit of an echo chamber as it doesn’t always reach the folks who need or want to learn more about cloud computing.
Ben’s goal with his lightning talk was to break out of the echo chamber, and get the word out that there are a number of helpful resources available for folks who’d like to learn more about cloud.
- CloudU – is an online resource that offers “Cloud 101”, an education on cloud computing. The goal of CloudU is help folks learn enough to ask relevant questions (to get the “A-Ha!” as Ben put it). CloudU offers no product recommendations and is vendor neutral. It consists of 10 modules that teaches the basics of cloud computing (why cloud? what are economics around cloud, what are the security implications of cloud? why open vs. vendor lock-in, etc.)
- LinkedIn – The second resource Ben mentioned is the CloudU LinkedIn community. It has a 1,000 or so members and is a great resource to learn more & discuss cloud computing with others.
You can follow Ben Kepes on Twitter at @benkepes or read his blog, Diversity.