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, ...