Steve Staso - Computing Solutions Strategist

I attended the first North American Oracle Cloud Computing Forum yesterday in West Hollywood, CA.

The 2 takeaways were:
- Oracle has started offering their DB and App products on cloud service providers like Amazon.
-- Deploy. You can use, download, and build AMIs using your own Oracle licenses or use the provided licensed AMI's at a higher cost.
-- Backup. You can also (and should) backup your Oracle database to the cloud right now.

I'll be watching for more Oracle products and services coming soon.

- The big push was for building private Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds with Oracle/Sun infrastructure. This is the the sweet spot for Oracle/Sun with enterprise customers who have apps/policies that are just not ready or able to move to the cloud - maybe never. So take advantage of the technologies and techniques used by public clouds in your own datacenter.

PaaS Requirements would include:
- Shared Infrastructure with dynamic scaling
- Support for component sharing
- Support for Fast deployment
- Support for Self Service
- Support for Management and Automation

I learned about Oracle's Coherence, a distributed memory object caching system, - seemed similar to the more familiar open source memcached.

Oracle raffled off a prize for a lucky individual. Sorry you left 5 minutes early, Serge - you could have had a new Amazon Kindle.

Amazon's Steve Riley added to the agenda with a very quick overview of AWS cloud services and Oracle's new instance offering; and provided 75 free instance hours - not too shabby - that's 3 full days. Steve is an evangelist for AWS and focuses on Security for AWS.

Mixed in were a few product pitches: Oracle Enterprise Manager; and Sun's full line of Servers, Storage, and Solaris for building world class cloud infrastructures - which provided good reminders for the reason why Sun and Oracle are now together.

It was a great day to be at the top of a posh hotel on the Sunset strip - the high winds overnight blew out all the low-lying overcast and smog to provide one of the best views of the Los Angeles basin I've ever seen.

Thanks to those who invited me - good times.