I had the opportunity to represent enStratus at two conferences recently. I didn't expect them to be anything alike, as they represented two divergent aspects of my role at enStratus.
The first was CloudCamp Boston—an unconference typically attended by tech-savvy early cloud adopters, or business people steeped in knowledge relating to the cloud. The second was An Event Apart Minneapolis—a two-day conference involving the various disciplines necessary to create great web experiences with today's technologies, including design, development, content and usability. Star Trek jokes got a few chuckles, don't get me wrong, but web fonts sparked more passionate responses from this crowd.
Even if these events had taken place in the same city or venue I wouldn't have expected any cross-over attendance. That's why I'm surprised to realize, in retrospect, that they actually shared so much in common. The most striking similarity was the recurrent theme of the open web and standards.
Openness and standards
Both conferences placed a lot of value on the path to standardization, developed in accordance with business needs. Browser prefixes are providing the necessary flexibility as new CSS3 standards are reworked and refined in real time, and HTML5 (notably not XHTML) are being crafted with a heavy emphasis on what has and has not worked in the wild, and what's been sorely lacking.
The path to standardization for cloud computing is less clear, but it's clearly similarly valued. The first conversation I joined in Boston covered things like how to improve the interoperability of cloud API's as well the separate conversation of how to standardize data for interoperability. It was noted that partnerships of Salesforce represent a successful example of business needs driving the development of API's. How can these efforts be truly open, collaborative, embraced AND future-proof as business needs evolve? Where do open source communities (as well as open source API's such as Dasein Cloud) fit into the equation?
The second shared theme that I noticed between the two conferences was all about practicality.
What's available NOW? What can we take advantage of in 2010?
HTML5 and CSS3 are technically still in spec mode. But anybody that sits around waiting for finalized standards is missing the boat. Conversations were focused on what is already available and what can be leveraged to improve the user experience of our websites and applications. enStratus has earned a reputation for the ease-of-use of it's console, and we're in the process of building on that success with these new technologies.
One conversation I joined in Boston focused on what's ready now in the cloud space. Most of the discussion related to software as a service (and what counts as such) but questions arose about what aspects of infrastructure as a service are really, truly ready for operation.
While the conversations at both conferences related to each other, they were also common with the value of enStratus. In terms of openness and standards, enStratus already supports about a dozen private and public cloud platforms, and has contributed the Dasein Cloud API to provide an abstraction for applications written independent of the clouds they are controlling. enStratus is also one of the original supporters of OpenStack. Perhaps even more exciting is that by addressing the concerns relating to cloud interoperability, security, reliability and backups, enStratus can be leveraged now, in 2010, by enterprises ready to see the benefits of cloud computing.
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