In the last week I attended Cloud Camp and Structure 08 in San Francisco, CA. Both events were well worth the time and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting so many great people.

I think that Jonathan Yarmis' talk summed up my feeling the best when he said, "The world is about to change, and change in profoundly interesting ways." I just can't agree more. This is one of the most amazing times and there is so much opportunity!

I ran an un-conference session at Cloud Camp on the topic, "Developing and Deploying Web Applications in the Cloud: Best Practices and Pitfalls. As best I can make out my scribble on the white board a group of about 30 came up with the following.

The point of this session was to outline things you can do to make the applications you develop and deploy work better in the cloud.

Here are some of the people from the session.

Best Practices

Keep some Secrets
Automatate Deployment and Testing
Follow Coding Standards
Log, Log, Log
Monitor very well
Instrumentation
Make developers feels the pain too (developers said this!)
Use Change Management
Avoid Shared Resources (for scale) - NFS for example
Stay Stateless
Create best practices to follow
Define your metrics (peformance, etc.) up front
TEST TEST TEST
Profile your code

Pitfalls

<unfortunately my photo didn't come out good enough to read of that side of the board, if you have one let me know please>

Resources

<also couldn't read this, silly iPhone camera>

In summary, my big take away from this week is that we are right at the tipping point where the market is latching on to some of the concepts of Cloud Computing and seeing the potential. My guess is that in the the next 3-5 years Cloud Computing will be as pervasive as Social Networking is today probably.