Giving Cloud Computing An Edge - LOSUG March 2010

The LOSUG seems to be the user group with the least cross over of attendees that I go to. It seems to be a three part mix - Sun engineers going along to meet co-workers and get the external eye on to what’s happening in different parts of the project, Unix people with dozens of years of experience who want something technical and interesting that matters on the server and people that don’t listen to the speaker and then ask questions that, quite frankly, they should be embarrassed over. It’s hard to stress how much I’ve always enjoyed the talks at LOSUG but some of the questions are just… insane.

Right, now I’ve got that of my chest - and I’ll probably get lynched for it in the future - back to the March presentation by Alasdair Lumsden. I’m not going in to details about it as you can read the Giving Cloud Computing An Edge slides yourself now. It was an interesting talk and provided a nice counterbalance to similar talks I’ve heard in the past about Xen and UML hosting.

What made this LOSUG different to all the others though is that things are changing. Sun’s always been very supportive of LOSUG (and always willing to put their hand in their pockets for food, drink and speakers) and now that Sun is owned by Oracle the group will be less driven by the core organisers. You can find more details (and less of me putting words in peoples mouths) at The Future of LOSUG but I wanted to take this chance to both encourage people to come along and show Oracle that the group’s important and to say thank you to Joy Marshall, James MacFarlane and Stuart Smith - who have month in and month out organised an excellent event with speakers you couldn’t see anywhere else.