simondelliott

A rainy day for cloud puns

You IT and Computer professionals out there better watch out, your land is about to be invaded … by the amazonians.

On Tuesday I went to the Amazon Web Services startup event in the wonderful British Museum, for a five hour cloud computing pun festival. Here are some of the shocking attempts at humor that I recorded, more out of a perverse curiosity rather than recording the humor for posterity
Where do you go after the Planet … the Cloud
The Sky is the limit
You’ve got Clouded vision
Flying through the Clouds

The event was excellent, well run, great content and good bunch to network with. And because there was no alcohol I didn’t make a complete chump of myself. What I think Amazon have done that truly amazes me is how they have hooked up everything you need to make a media product with the existing amazon market place and sales tools needed to derive a revenue from it. Whats more they have codified all the processed necessary to make it happen.

There was an interesting audience make up of around 1000 in total, I counted down my row and worked out these percentages.

• 20% Suits
• 20% Business casual
• 10% Casual
• 2% Female
• 3% Bald
• 5% Flamboyant media types

Whenever I try and make, or launch something I dread the endless conversations with the operational team (Luddites more resistive to change than a glacier) to persuade them to commission a new box or worse still … change an old one. Well amazon have really thought about this, and have provided both a web UI and an API to do it. This means that I can get development code into production faster, and If I can do that … it means that I can either demonstrate that an innovation fails or derive revenue from it with a smaller expense (my precious time).

I do have a concern that this inevitable migration to large cloud providers will ultimately create an even larger dependency on a shrinking set of suppliers. In the end this is anti consumer, maybe its time for a state run or even UN owned cloud?

Note:
For those of you who are into sustainability, when someone asked the question “Will Amazon be using renewable energy sources for its servers” there was a big laugh and a stumped speaker.