Ari Zilka CTO of Terracota gave an excellent presentation on how the product works and how it can be used. I was not going to attend this session, but he was excellent on the previous sessions panel, so i was drawn to it. His view on the world of using stateful in memory data and replication goes against the views of many, but is very compelling. I’ll be looking into it deeply.
Scale up, Scale out, Split the problem space, tune or re-architect. You may want to build with a vendor in mind.
Highlighting that the focus should be on social rather than technical skills Kent coaxed developers towards integration with the business people. He pointed out that honesty works and hiding behind complexity and changing requirements is not the best way to build business partners and get them to trust in the software your developing. This is a simple and yet key problem for many.
Jim Webber and Martin Fowler where fantastic. Humorous and poignant from beginning to end. You really had to be there, go to InfoQ and hope they filmed it.
Without a doubt the highlight of the day so far. The panel of the days presenters covered the whole spectrum of cloud computing from current position to future issues. I have five pages of notes from this so not one for my N810 or my thumbs will go dead. The key points of interest to me where the fact that the cloud is almost a renewal of some old technology ideas that did not quite make it, mixed in with standard tried and tested ideas and innovative pricing. If there was or will be a key issue it has to be Security (trust), i think it would only take one major security breach (loss or steal of data) and it could take down a company; many will have to base themselves firmly around trust so one to watch.
I posted about pipes about a year ago and it has since increased its modules from 20 to 50 and makes up 1/3 of all mash-up calls to Google. I really need to play with it some more, it really is very cool, bringing a lot of power without the need to code and enabling those that can to spend more time on the applications that consume the data.
The google data API talk concentrated on decisions behind the selection of REST over SOAP; basically RESTs four operations get,put, post and delete are likely to cover 90% of your needs. Also the extensions they have developed around query, authentication, concurrent operations and batch updates. These concepts were tied in nicely to examples of use and comments regarding the benefits of building on or with standards; less need to document a big one.
I found the speaker a little monotone, but the content of the talk was very interesting. It provided a very clear view of how Merrel Lynch deals with the billions of daily messages, produced by there systems globally. The break down of message precedence and the aim of automated fixing of an issue within an 18 second window, was very interesting. The compounded issue of differing vendor error messages, dashboards and the overarching job of combining these into monitoring dashboards at a zone, site, region and global levels was a real eye opener.
All to much about the product, gave up after 10 mins and went to the banking track.
I already use Jungle Disk which is the amazon S3 (simple storage service). But this talk went through the entire set of services, giving enough insight into each to provoke thought, as to potential uses. Of great interest to me was the Elastic compute cloud, allowing for fast scalability and setup, with a time, bandwidth and computing power pricing model. The up and coming Simple DB, an object database looked very interesting.
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