Last week Thursday, the St. Louis cloud computing community came together for our first CloudCamp. If you caught any of my previous posts you know that excitement was really mounting in the run-up to the event, with the event selling out and sponsors signing on practically up to the very last minute. Well, the event itself didn’t fail to deliver on our expectations. Not by a long shot. CloudCamp St. Louis was a smashing success!

Congratulations St. Louis, on hosting your first CloudCamp, and thanks to everyone who sponsored, assisted with and attended the event!

Based on our estimates, over 130 people attended the event. The estimate isn’t too fuzzy, since we had 120 chairs in the main room and there were people lining the walls. This was 90%+ of the number of pre-registered attendees, which is much higher than typically seen in other cities. It’s a good thing we upped our catering number at the last minute. (We were fortunate to have had a very flexible and capable caterer.)

We anticipated a diverse crowd at the event, and this was confirmed by the show-of-hands poll I took at the opening of the event. Our audience identified themselves as approximately 40% developers, 40% IT infrastructure folks, 10% IT management and 10% business management. When asked how many of the audience had ever participated in an unconference, only a handful of people raised their hands. (At which point, I knew we were in for a fun night!)

Lightening Talks

There were four Lightening Talks featured at the event.

• Mike Bradley from Rackspace on The Rackspace Cloud
• Brian Blanchard on behalf of Microsoft, on Windows Azure
• Alex Miller, with a community on Distributed Caching in the Cloud
• Michael Groner, with a community talk on Map Reduce and Cloud Computing

I’ll be posting or pointing to these slide decks soon.

The first couple of lightening talks went a bit over the allotted 5-minutes and were each very focused on a specific vendor offering. The latter two in contrast were minimally promotional and very well received by attendees. I’m not trying to call anyone out here, but it’s worth mentioning that as an organizer, balancing the needs and desires of the sponsors against the needs and desires of the attendees is one of the most challenging aspects of running a CloudCamp.

Kyle Cordes, himself a sponsor through his company Oasis Digital suggested that each sponsor be given one slide and 10 seconds of pitch-time, max. I think this is a bit extreme, but I could go for 30 to 60 seconds. Anything beyond should be strictly educational and non-promotional and vetted beforehand as such. Thoughts on this?

Unpanel

After the lightening talks we held the Unpanel. The Unpanel — a bit of a CloudCamp tradition at this point — is a panel discussion in which audience members are selected as panelists and the audience also comes up with questions for the panel. The Unpanel is a great way to get folks’ juices flowing and into the unconference groove.

After a bit of prodding, we identified the panel and presented them with a pretty broad array of questions, including:

• Will we run out of bandwidth for cloud computing?
• How to address security in the cloud?
• How to migrate in/out of the cloud?
• How to address compliance in the cloud?
• How to address fraud in the cloud?

As you can imagine, none of these questions was fully addressed in the brief time each panelist was given to speak, but we accomplished the mission of spurring on discussion, at several points getting dangerously close to veering off into outright debate. (The relationship between virtualization and cloud computing was a particularly contentious issue.)

Breakout Sessions

We then channeled our creative and argumentative energy into the choosing and participating in breakout sessions. We had time for two consecutive rounds of breakouts, and access to six rooms of varying sizes, though we only ever needed four at once.

Before breaking up, we identified these sessions:

First round:

• The Enterprise Cloud Use-Case Panel
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Big Fail in the Cloud
• Fraud in the Cloud

Second round:

• Software Development Perspectives: Idioms, Architectures, Patterns for Cloud Computing
• Virtualization and Cloud
• Building Clouds
• Cloud Data and Storage

The majority of attendees attended the first two sessions on each list, which were held in the biggest rooms. In fact, the latter two sessions of the second round never really got any steam, and the folks interested in them either mingled in the food area or went to one of the two major sessions.

I spent most of my time in the Enterprise Use-Case Panel and the Software Development Perspectives sessions, both very well attended and quite interesting, but found myself popping in and out of each of the sessions each round, just to ensure all was going smoothly.

Looking Forward: Cloud Computing in St. Louis

After the breakouts, we pulled everyone back together for a brief wrap-up. We got a quick rundown from an attendee of each breakout. The energy was still high and we a pretty big crowd remained, considering it was 10pm.

Before leaving, I asked about interest in future CloudCamps and the possibility of starting up a cloud computing users group and there was strong interest in both. I’m excited to announce here that the St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group is now forming. Contact me if you’re interested in helping out or participating, and stay tuned for more information.