Notes from MonadLUG, 12-Nov-2009: Cloud Computing

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Fri Nov 13 18:01:29 EST 2009


Ten people attended the November meeting of the Monadnock Region Linux 
User Group, MonadLUG, on the usual second Thursday of the month at the 
SAU #1 offices in Peterborough, NH.

Due to an emergency school board meeting, we had to move to another 
classroom. Thanks to our sponsor, Ken, for arranging the alternate room 
on short notice.

Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order and turned it over to 
MonadLUG's new coordinator, Philip Sbrogna. Philip had a few 
announcements and lead a round of introductions. We had a variety of 
attendees with a range of experience and interests.

Tim Wessels [1] ran the discussion on Cloud Computing. Tim introduced 
the subject with a great monologue on tracing the history of computing 
on the desktop over the past 25 years, from single PCs and 
mini-computers, through the networking era, into the internet and 
world-wide computing, touching on the orders-of-magnitude increase in 
speed, capacity, storage and processing power. He pointed out how the 
poor economic outlook is probably going to be accelerating the move from 
stand-alone to company-owned data centers to shared hosting machines to 
virtual, scaleable, pay-as-you-go computing infrastructures. We touched 
on the operational issues, security issues, and legal aspects. Many 
members contributed to the discussion with insights on why they'd want 
to use cloud computing, concerns their customers raise, situations where 
cloud computing was or was not a good fit, and their personal 
experiences with using cloud computing.

Tim mentioned that he's looked through a lot of books and hasn't found 
many that have more information than can be read in the trade press. 
However, he recommend the book: Cloud Security and Privacy, by Tim 
Mather, Subra Kumaraswamy, Shahed Latif, published by O'Reilly Media, 
September 2009, [2]

Thanks to Tim for moderating the discussion, to Philip for organizing 
the meeting, to Ken and the SAU#1 office for the facilities, and to all 
who attended and participated.

[1] http://www.timwessels.com/about_tim_wessels.htm
[2] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596802776/

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche&  Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com



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