Cloud Computing General [A]

This week I did a few general things to get in a cloud computing mood again:

1. On Monday September 27th I attended the Microsoft conference 'A Journey to the Cloud' (http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/ff955851.aspx), where I went to the following talks:
   
   
   
   • The Microsoft Cloud Continuum (Bart Vande Ghinste, Enterprise Architect for MS Belgium & Luxembourg): this was a good summary of what cloud computing stands for and why MS beliefs it will be big.
   
   
   • The Road to a Private Cloud Infrastructure (Eduardo Kassner, Enterprise Technical Architect for MS Corporation): this was less interesting, because the talk was very Microsoft oriented and the recorded demo videos were hard to follow for someone who has no Windows Azure experience.
   
   
   • An Architecture Lap around the Windows Azure Platform (Kurt Claeys, Technical Solution Specialist for MS EMEA): fun introduction to the Azure platform.
   
   
   • IaaS: Principles and Patterns for the Private Cloud (Alberto Boczar, Technical Architect for MS Corporation): this was a very good speaker which made his talk interesting. He presented a general overview of the principles and patterns of cloud computing.


2. Started reading "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google" by Nicholas Carr on my Kindle. (http://goo.gl/GBBu)


3. I experimented a bit with Amazon EC2. Became a bit familiar with the AWS Management Console interface, ran an instance for the first time and connected to it through SSH, ...

Introduction

My final year at the University of Antwerp started, which means that I'll have to write a thesis this year.
My interest in cloud computing lead to the choice of the ESP assignment titled "A Broker for Cost-efficient QoS aware resource allocation in EC2".
A description in Dutch can be found here.
I look forward on doing a lot of research on the topic this year.
I'll try to post on this blog what is going on from time to time.