One of the best keynotes at this year's MySQL Conference & Expo was a panel session led by Kaj Arnö, MySQL's vice president of community relations. Kaj pulled in a cross-section of leading cloud gurus, including Lew Tucker CTO of Sun Microsystems' cloud efforts; Prashant Malik; Cassandra Dude from Facebook; Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale; Mike Culver from Amazon; Chander Kant, CEO of cloud backup vendor Zmanda; Monty Taylor, MySQL Drizzle Geek; and Jeremy Zawodny from Craigslist.
While it was a big panel, everyone was engaged and contributing to the discussion, bringing up angles about the technology, where and when to consider cloud technologies, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. Clearly we are still in the very early days of cloud computing, and things will evolve for another 5 to 10 years. But it's an interesting time and there's definitely an intersection as open source software enables and even drives much of this adoption.
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It seems that there are new open source cloud startup companies being launched every month and a tremendous interest among corporate clients to create their own private cloud. Some of the problems will be solved in these new companies, and no doubt we'll figure out other problems that need to be solved only as the technology gets adopted. In that respect, maybe cloud computing will evolve much like open source has over the last 10 years.
You can view a portion of the video that I shot over at YouTube: