I attended CloudCamp last week in London. CloudCamp was a mini-conference for people interested in cloud computing, and turned out to be quite interesting.

Simon Wardley’s presentation on the trends in cloud computing was very interesting, both in terms of content and presentation style. He ran through a bit more than 100 slides in 10 minutes, but all those slides were photos or movie screen grabs that added a bit of humour to the talk and made it even more interesting to watch. Simon compared IT infrastructure to the invention and adoption of mass-distributed electricity, claiming that the recent events in the IT industry signaled a shift from a product based to service based economy.

He then pointed out that vendor lock-in, competitive pricing and being left with no choice to migrate are the challenges that we’ll need to face in the future. What happens if the infrastructure provider goes bust? In-house APIs and standards more or less force us to develop applications for individual provider environments, so migration today could host a lot of time and mone