Day two of Gluecon felt more oriented to the developers attending. They were a happy lot.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written code, so I spent more time talking with the demo companies than attending breakout sessions, but I did want to note at least one presentation.
Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus gave the morning keynote challenging us to think about macro development trends over the decades. He posits that we are only at the beginning of the cloud movement, which he predicts will play itself out over the next 10 or more years. As we transition from the predominant development theme of LAMP to Cloud, our thinking needs to change too.
Where we once though of:
- code, we now think of APIs
- scaling, we now think of elasticity,
- stacks, we now think of ensembles (the group of cloud APIs and services we pull together to make an application)
Marten is a clear thinker and compelling speaker – reason enough to ignore my laptop and listen. That said, maybe it was the lighting, but seeing his Finnish good looks on stage and hearing the slight accent had me thinking of the Terminator. Anyone sent from Skynet gets my immediate attention.
On to the demo companies. Here are some of my favorites:
- Standing Cloud offers an innovative Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. They allow you to quickly create a new image, install many commonly used applications, easily back up the instance, monitor availability, automatically move your images from one cloud platform to another, and more. Remember the recent AWS failure? Had you been a Standing Cloud customer, you could have quickly moved your images to a completely different cloud provider. Yeah, pretty impressive. Check them out.
- StatsMix is greasing the skids on collecting, analyzing and presenting internal corporate data. Think dashboards on the quick. If you are an internal IT developer and a business manager asks you to start tracking a metric for analysis and reporting, don’t groan. Instead give StatsMix a try. In minutes you’ll have solved the problem and look like a hero.
- BigDoor has made layering game mechanics on your existing site very easy. At a past company I led, before BigDoor existed, we rolled our own game mechanics and watched a significant improvement in engagement. BigDoor provides a cloud service that you can expose on your website via a minibar at the bottom of your browser. They promise to offer widgets soon. Or, if you have the time and budget you can use their API and customize the game layer on your site. I wish BigDoor had existed back in 2008.
Glue’s Demo Pavillion of start-up companies was new this year and was a big hit. 15 companies were selected to demo completely free. What a great benefit to the start-up community. Thanks to Alcatel-Lucent for sponsoring this welcome addition.
Gluecon was another outstanding Eric Norlin conference. Didn’t make it? Take a look at Defrag coming up on November 9th & 10th.
I’ll see you there.
