Wow, great week last week at the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara. Alistair and Dave set out to create the “definitive event” for the cloud computing community, and definitely succeeded in my book — except of course for CloudCamp!

Most of my time last week was consumed by Appistry’s launch of CloudIQ Storage, so I didn’t get to check out as many sessions as I otherwise would have liked. The ones I did attend were great though, especially Randy Bias’ panel on migrating to the cloud (featuring Tom Gregory from Appistry customer Presidio Health) the ‘Ubicomp‘ panel that I was on, which focused on the broader implications of ubiquitous computing and the cloud.

Another highlight was Tuesday evening’s SF Cloud Club meeting, organized by James Watters and Shanley Kane. The event was a bit over-scheduled, with about 8 companies due to present on the evening’s theme — platform-as-a-service (PaaS) — but other than that it was a great event for both networking and learning.

The evening’s “entertainment” was provided by Shlomo Swidler, who demonstrated the creation of a physical cloud — yes, you know, the water kind — for the group. Here’s the video I shot. (Don’t worry, it steadies out after the first few seconds.)