On to the clouds! Date:   Thursday , June 09, 2011 Bangalore: The Cloud Developers Conference 2011, organized by SiliconIndia exceeded expectations as the symposium gathered top flight developers and industry professionals across the cloud spectrum for a one day of networking and open discussions. The conference showcased cloud advancement in networks, storage, applications, interoperations and security to the Information Technology Enterprise. The conference focused on two key areas Cloud Apps and the Cloud Infrastructure. Cloud Apps track opening session on Collaboration in the Cloud presented by Dr. Vivek Mansingh, President- Collaboration & Communications Group from Cisco India, emphasized on next era of IT ecosystem, where he said, “Like networking technologies have flattened the world and removed geographical distances, cloud computing is flattening the IT world by making IT resources available to anyone, anywhere.” Stepping in next was Janakiram MSV, Technology Evangelist from Amazon Web Services who spoke on ‘Building Powerful Web Applications in the AWS Cloud” where he introduced Amazon Web Services from a business and technical perspective. He also briefed about how AWS can be used to build robust, cost-effective, secure, and high-scalable applications. Sudharshini HS, Senior Systems Engineer from VMware India elaborated on how VM ware works with the customer to transition to their cloud in a responsible, evolutionary approach, without disrupting the business at-hand. She also said that VM ware is making hybrid cloud computing a reality which enables the customers to make smart, confident business decisions, without technical constraints. VMware’s Cloud Application Platform is VMware vFabric which will enable Java developers to leverage the Spring framework – the most commonly used framework for Java development in the world – for cloud application development. Deliberating on Integrated financial applications using Intuits PaaS Solution, George Chiramattel Software Architect, Intuit was of the view that IPP is the easiest way to build SaaS and sell them to millions of small business customers. Binu Raj, Senior Director - Engineering, Cloud Computing from Yahoo! delved on ‘The Yahoo Cloud: Challenges in deploying multi-tier applications on the cloud’. According to him ‘Agility with Stability in cloud can be achieved with true declarative deployment specifications’. Ramesh Loganathan, VP Products & Center Head from Progress Software basically covered one aspect of the emerging cloud-leveraged enterprise IT solution space. He said the opportunity for real time business insights are made possible by having solutions that are mostly accessible over web/intranet and also by virtue of being on a web based cloud which can be accessible through service calls as web services or other web based protocols. A good sign off was given to the track by Bharati Lele, Head - Innovation Labs from L&T Infotech , who spoke on Cloud Computing for Business, she was of the view that, “In this federated world, one cloud cannot suffice all needs and thus it is important to have a mediation platform which will give seamless view to end user.” Cloud Infrastructure Speaking in the opening session Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, Head- Software Engineering Research lab from SETLabs- Infosys, gave a detailed note on the need for a thorough understanding of service and REST oriented API security. The audience got a clear understanding of the need for key security desiderata in cloud like user centric identity management, multi-factor authentication (like HMAC ) for APIs and deployment of higher level firewalls like JSON/XML firewalls. Cloud Systems Automation was elaborated by Sundara Nagarajan, Director R&D- Storage Works Division from HP, who was of the opinion that enterprises assimilate cloud technology for providing IT services to users, they will also require seamless brokering among the traditional, private, virtual private industry clouds and public cloud services. The Cloud Developers conference gave access to the best content from the experts who are actually living this disruptive transformation every day. The conference gave away details on how to optimize cost, performance, capacity and risk, and real world end user examples that demonstrated the benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing. The conference was sponsored by Amazon Web Services, VMware and DreamOrbit. The sponsors put in their best to make this event a success. McGraw Hill was the exhibitor for the day.