starting sometime between 6pm and 6.30pm, as your schedule suits, this Wednesday 21st July!

It’s been a while, but it’s time to breathe some life back into the UK’s Amazon Web Services community!

My name is Craig Box, and Ross has very kindly accepted my offer to share some of my thoughts on this site. In my role at the Symbian Foundation I’ve been building some services with AWS, and will shortly be writing some posts about the challenges my team and I have faced, and the efficiencies we have gained, moving from a “real server” infrastructure (albeit one on VMware) to the cloud, by way of EC2.

Until then, why not drop by our mailing list and introduce yourself?

(Thanks to Flickr user David Steltz for licensing his photo CC-by-SA.)

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

You can download the following presentations here:

• Looking inside a cloud — Gihan Munasinghe from Flexiscale
• Cloud, Dead Simple — Stwart Townsend from SUN Microsystems
• The Cloud: Implications for the Enterprise — Matt Deacon from Microsoft
• CloudGazing– Steve Caughey from Arjuna
• Bootstrap and Transition, the emailcloud story — Ross Cooney from Rozmic

You can see videos of some of the presentations here :

• Stewart Townsend
• Ross Cooney
• Simone Brunozzi
• Matt Deacon

I am sorry to say that the video of Gihan Munasinghe was of very poor sound quality.

You can view more photos here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ross.cooney/CloudCampNewcastle2009

Here at http://www.slideshare.net/cpurrington/getting-started-on-aws are the slides Neill used to introduce the workshop and provide some useful links to tutorials and tools.

Thanks too to Blake and Ryan from Heroku, who introduced us all to their on demand, scalable Ruby platform and hosting environment, find out more at www.heroku.com.

Next scheduled meeting is end of September, if you would like to talk, demo , present please let me know chris-dot-purrington-at-cohesiveft-dot-com.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

About CloudCamp London

Several attendees at the March CloudCamp ask if they could hear from the sponsors to learn what they had to offer cloud computing. In response to this feedback we are including an option for you to hear directly from the sponsoring vendors. Other feedback was the last event was way too large, this time we are using a smaller venue, thank you to Microsoft for allowing is to use their Victoria office. Although smaller we are still targeting 300 attendees.

London CloudCamps have slightly more format than the pure unconferences run in the US, that’s the way we Brit’s seem to like it.

Following it’s success at CloudCamp Scotland and the recent CloudCamp Mixer at Cloud Expo Europe we are introducing an Unpanel, where the panel members will be selected on the night (if you have expertise to share put yourself forward), the panel will answer your questions posted on flip charts at the 7pm break. Any Unpanel discussions needed further debate will be voted on to become the topics for unconference discussion at 7.45pm.

Agenda

17h30 Registration, Beer & Networking
18h00 Lightning Talks -Strictly limited to 5 minutes each. No sales pitches!
19h00 Beer & Networking break – if you have questions for the Unpanel put them up on the flip charts
19h15 Unpanel – experts from the audience, speakers, and sponsors come together to answer you questions
19h45 Unconference Discussions and/or Sponsor Briefings – your choice, chose on the night where you want go and join in.
21h00 Networking – Beer and Pizza
22h00 Close

Registration at http://cloudcamplondon4.eventbrite.com/

Sponsors

CloudCamp would not be possible with out the generous support of it’s sponsors;

Microsoft, CohesiveFT, enStratus, SkillsMatter, Rightscale,

Flexiscale, Cloudsoft, SMEStorage, Rain Store,

SalesForce, Quest, Cisco, and Canonical

This is the community’s unconference we want you to determine the content. Please tell us what you would like to hear about, what you would like debated, if you want to give a talk or lead a discussion.

"High Performance Computing Clusters with the Amazon Cloud" 
 

Synopsis:

At his third appointment with the Amazon Web Services User Group in London, Nicola Cardace is committed to sustain with additional curiosity and momentum the highly skilled and participative crowd of experts, academics and geeks in London. He will cover a few cutting edge approaches for High Performance Computing clustering and how it can all be deployed in very short time following the on-demand paradigm of Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing Cloud. These (open-source) tools are available worldwide across the scientific and research community and are already successfully used by a number of visionary academic and commercial projects.

Instead of building your own supercomputer at home, this time you will get an inspiration on how to build one from home, instead.

The presentation is designed to encourage your participation together with an open and relaxed discussion.

Auto-Scaling Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr

Nginx and Memcached on EC2,a 400% boost!

NASDAQ exchange re-play on AWS

Persistent Django on Amazon EC2

and covered

EBSTaking Massive Distributed Computing to the Common Man – Hadoop on Amazon EC2/S3, in a little more detail

Nick’s slides included a lot of useful links, the slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/cpurrington/aws-hadoop-meetup-300409

We did not have time to cover CohesiveFT’s cloud onboarding solutions; the ElasticServer software factory and Overlay Network solution VPN-Cubed. Hopefully we’ll cover them next time, in the mean time the slides are posted at http://www.slideshare.net/cpurrington/onboarding-for-public-private-and-hybrid-clouds-aws-300409

Amazon Web Services is coming to London! You are invited to attend this exclusive half-day event on April 28 which will show business and technology leaders how to be successful with AWS. This event will show you how to get started with AWS and how to architect your applications for the cloud. Also, hear how companies of all sizes, from all industries are using services, such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, to power everything from their websites to workflows.

Reasons to attend:

• Learn why and how to integrate AWS cloud computing solutions into your business
• Hear from existing customers about their uses of and experiences with AWS
• Network with AWS representatives and local tech leaders

Event Details:

April 28, 2009, British Museum, London, UK

• 13:00-17:00: Presentations from AWS and local tech leaders
• 17:00-19:00: Networking/Cocktail Reception

Seats are limited, register today.

Our next two meetings 31st March and 30th April will be jargon free events to educate, entertain and fascinate geeks and non-geeks about the “silent revolution” of using web, computing, storage, databases, and payment processing services in the same way as we today perceive electricity: an utility, on-demand service. This is real and it is happening today, everywhere.

This is the time where smart players will have the same opportunities as well established entities and the infrastructural barriers to the service economy are disappearing. Large enterprises are redefining their infrastructure investment and their total cost of ownership, while agile start-ups – without no upfront investment – instantly tapping into resources that a few years ago would only have dreamt of.

Nicola Cardace will present a journey though the resources that are available to AWS users, the current paradigm shift in the mind of large enterprise architects in the City and will also project yourself straight into the brain of the technology gurus of a few buzzing start-ups in the current European scene, how they are tackling scalability and control.

The talk will end with an interactive session to give you the opportunity to share your experience.

Please come along, CohesiveFT will buy you a beer in the Crown on the Green afterwards. Let your friends, colleagues, boss, anyone who wants to know more about the Cloud know about the meetup.

Sign up at

31st March 2009 http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-an-intro-to-cloud-computing

30th April 2009 http://skillsmatter.com/event/cloud-grid/amazon-web-services-meetup-323

In the presentation I gave an introduction the Cloud Computing (SaaS, PaaS & IaaS) and how the technology is different to the doomed ASP model of the Dot Bomb days.

The main point of my talk was that while Cloud Computing opens up several security and compliance problems (if you use sensitive data in a shared environment) it is perfectly safe to use for rather inoculous data that is not ’sensitive’. While you would be silly to use a SaaS provider to host your Child Protection Register, it would be perfectly fine to host your Christmas website or to host a large file that you want to make available to many users.

We also touched upon the advantages of using IaaS providers to rent hardware on short term projects or for development. The main goal is to lower investment costs, increase speed to market and provide a better service to your userbase. In my view, the main advantages of the technology are: 

• Pay per use
• Instant Scalability
• Reliability
• APIs

You can download my presentation here:

• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2007)
• Cloud Computing introduction (Powerpoint 2003)