Technology

My Head in the Clouds – Cloud Computing

Scott Pantall

06/11/13 – I went to my first Colorado Technology Association (CTA) event on Tuesday. It was a presentation on cloud computing hosted by CTA, OCx Networks and Nebula, Inc. with Chris Kemp, co-founder of Nebula, Inc. as the keynote speaker. The audience was a fun mix of sales representatives and engineers and lucky for me OCx Networks was giving out notebooks. As far as I know, I was the only student there. There should really be more students at these things.

What is cloud computing? 

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or  service provider interaction. (http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf)

If that went over your head, cloud computing is what allows Google Drive, Dropbox and social media to exist. It’s what allows 1 million Android users to download Instagram in one day.

What can I do with Cloud Computing?

Kemp talked mostly about Openstack. Openstack is an open source software for building
private and public clouds (Openstack.org). It is one of the fastest growing open source technologies and is growing one of the biggest developer communities. As a computer science student, I asked Kemp, “What should I focus on to become an Openstack developer?” Here are some of the resources mentioned by Kemp and a guy sitting behind me who’s name I didn’t catch:

If you know of any good Openstack or cloud computing resources, both online and local, please share them in the comments.