The second session I noticed “Software Architecture for the Cloud” which I missed when I looked at the schedule, so I decided to drop java encryption for it instead. 
The presentation began with an overview of cloud computing… what it is, what it means for you, etc. Nothing to fancy, just kind of fleshed out the concepts behind virtualization and cloud computing. But after that things got interesting as he delved into different patterns to achieve scalability in the cloud.
One pattern he described was the master worker pattern, which I instantly recognized through the work I had done in the past with Hadoop and CouchDB’s map/reduce system and discussed how to apply it with amazon ec2 to dynamically create new workers as needed.
Naturally, moving forward he brought up how to do Map / Reduce using Hadoop and the details of how to using it to computer and process data on many concurrent nodes as well as using horizontal replication across nodes to reduce the load on existing servers… if things start getting sluggish, just add a new server to the cluster.
Next up was a discussion on NoSQL databases and caching servers and he noted that these are an essential component to cloud computing. The four big products to consider are memcached, GigaSpaces, Oracle Coherence, and Terracotta.
This presentation made me realize just how much I missed working with Amazon EC2. I’m tempted to sign up an account tonight and just put some random app out there.
