First, a little moan and a yawn. I always thought "Open" implied "Inclusive" and "Accepting". That the whole ethos of the Open Source movement was one of support and sharing and improvment without hinder. So why do Open Source people spend so much time taking digs at Microsoft products. So many overheard conversations here have included some swipe at Bills boys.

And another moan. I was hoping to be, in some way, inspired by a Key Note speech from Chris DiBona from Google. Some insight into where Open Source Systems were taking us in this new age of Cloud Computing perhaps. Sorry no. Some poor word play jokes on Asterisk and some discussion on the number of Open Source projects on the go and their licensing models. It didn't shake the planet. And all delivered in a rather self indulgent ramble. I don't know maybe it was an off day or maybe he's no God. Maybe much like "in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king", "in the land of the Open Source geek, the man who can string more than two words together is a presenter".

So I thought I would follow the "Cloud" track for the presentations today. By the time I reached the final presentation, there really had not been much "Cloud" cover. There was a lot of running Asterisk in different virtual environments, VMWare, ESXi, XEN and OpenVZ. All of which I found interesting, though it was not obvious which system best suited Asterisk. There was also some mention of resillient high availability configurations for Asterisk Servers. But no Cloud, not really. This was until Eric Chamberlain from rf.comn presented. He started with a simple and straight forward summary of what was needed from Cloud based Services, what was good and what was less good and how Asterisk fitted in. Followed by some detail of creating an Asterisk machine image to run in the Amazon Cloud. He could be accused of being on a commsion from Amazon but I think that would be unfare. rf.com had spent some time picking a Cloud service provider and Amazon fitted their needs.

Having now seen a pratical implementation of a project using Amazon EC2 I wonder why everything isn't run that way. I assume there is stuff that will not work in that environment, well just maybe it would be better changed to run in a way that suited the Cloud.

I didn't go to the AstriCon party tonight as my jet lag stops me from doing anything after about 6pm local time :(

Overall 4 out of 5.