Amazon Web Services

Last month the AWSUG presented at the Codeworks Connect ‘Think and A Drink’ event in the Northern Stage, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The event was sponsored by Amazon Web Services and Rozmic and was attended by 120 people.

In a packed theatre developers, techies and commercial minds alike argued the merits of hosted services and investment in new technology at a time of global credit crunching. The event kicked off with a short presentation by Ross Cooney who gave s short introduction to cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

The program progressed to a panel discussion, chaired by Andrew Robson. The panel comprised of Ross Cooney (AWSUG and emailcloud, Tony Lucas (Flexiscale.net), Steve Caughey (Arjuna), Sarat Pediredla (Hedgehog Labs) and Duncan Mactear (4Projects).

The optimistic view, taken by the majority of the panel, was that we are on a journey towards cloud computing becoming the norm for business computing. Duncan Mactear of 4Projects sounded a more cautious note; his company provides SaaS for the construction industry but does not use cloud; instead their servers are hosted in a third-party data centre. To which Tony Lucas of Flexiscale pointed out that 10 years ago, similar companies weren’t even using hosting services.

Trust was raised as a key issue. Several panellists opined that interoperability was the best answer to this; then if your provider has problems, you can switch your application to another. Rozmic run their EmailCloud application on both Amazon and Flexiscale, switching between them when one has problems. The downside of this is that it is currently expensive to implement applications for multiple providers, although some companies (such as CohesiveFT and Rightscale) are providing systems to aid this process.

Excellent networking oppertunity

An air of real change was felt by the participating audience. “This will revolutionise the way we do business”, said Maxeen Turton, of Codeworks Connect, “Cloud Computing doesn’t just increase our capability to take on new business- it greatly increases our effectiveness in day to day use of our own server capacity.” By adopting cloud computing technology within their own organisational server structure, businesses discovered that they greatly improved server capacity in all areas, whilst saving power and money. Others discovered how SaaS can provide them with the same services normally affordable to large organisations, for a fraction of the cost.

The event was excellently organised by Maxeen Turton from Codeworks. This blog post was written with the help of Dave Berry.

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