I’ve been accepted to do a workshop on cloud computing at the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) Miami 09 conference. The title of the workshop is “How to build your app quickly and cheaply using the Cloud”. Title and the broad agenda were set by the conference organisers, and now I’ve got to fill it with life. I like Miami, and it will surely be nicer weather than Germany in February can possibly offer.
By the nature of the agenda I’ve been given, the general thrust of this workshop will be introductory in nature. I plan to go over some of the more notable options, such as GAE or Heroku, and touch on the pros and cons of the various approaches (particularly the PaaS vs. do it yourself on IaaS debate), but then I intend to work through a concrete example of deploying and managing an app on EC2. I also want to have some time to talk about the issue of cost: that whether using the cloud as a hosting provider makes economic sense (or not) is very context dependent. And I will try to convince everybody that a combination of virtual appliances and SCM is a game changer in a lot of ways — some of them perhaps not so obvious. Frankly, I also hope to be able to just have a good conversation with the participants about the challenges and benefits of using the cloud.
Obviously, this topic is not only a moving target, it’s moving at warp speed, and I will have to keep the plan / content a little flexible — the workshop I was thinking about doing yesterday is already outdated in the “managing your app in the cloud” department, and tomorrow, it will be some other aspect that is completely changed by some new development. More importantly, I would very much like to tailor the content to the participants, as much as possible. So, if you are planning to attend the workshop, by any chance, please let me know what you are interested in talking about, learning or experimenting with. I will do my best to work any suggestions, questions or feedback I get into the final workshop. Leave a comment here, send me an email, ping me on Twitter, Skype or whatever — I’m easy to find. 😉
