Inphina Thoughts

In this post, I would like to summarize my experiences and main learnings from the inaugural version of Conference on Up-Coming Technologies organized by IndicThreads in city of Pune, India. Conference was on August 20 and 21’2010 and this year’s theme was Cloud Frameworks and this being one of our main focus areas we were very excited to be part of the event.

Day 1 Summary

Kalpak Shah from Clogeny Technologies started the first presentation of the day with an elaborate overview about the motivations behind moving to Cloud, different types of offerings available in terms of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and ways to move to a Cloud platform along with things to keep in mind while making a decision.

Next was a session by Arun Gupta about Running Your Java EE applications in Cloud. Arun showed us the capabilities of Glass Fish for easy development of Java EE Applications on different Cloud frameworks like Amazon, Joyent and Elastra with lot of code samples.

Last session before lunch was by Prabodh Navare, Solutions Architect from SAS India on Architectural Challenges in Cloud Computing. According to him, some of the major areas to keep in mind while designing and developing applications for Cloud platforms would be :

• Auto-Scaling
• High-Performance
• Failure
• Data Portability
• Pay As You Go

Lunch gave an opportunity for some interesting discussions among different participants about the adaption and usage strategies of Cloud frameworks in their enterprises. First post-lunch session was by Prasad Nirantar and Sameer Naik from BMC Software. Prasad and Sameer presented a demo of Eucalyptus, an Open Source Private Cloud platform, explaining about its setup procedure along with it’s benefits.

Next session was from my colleague Vikas Hazrati. Vikas started by explaining the need of a Multi-Cloud capable framework, giving details about the various options currently available. He then explained in detail about the capabilities of jclouds framework through code samples and working examples of it’s integration with AmazonS3 and Microsoft Azure. His entire presentation is available at

I was the last one to present on first day. Topic of my presentation was Preparing your data for Cloud where I explained the choices, Software Developers & Designers have for data persistence from an Application point of view. I provided an overview of different RDBMS and Non Relational DBMS currently in market, their advantages and limitations along with their cloud capabilities. My presentation slides are also available at

At the end of the presentations, there was a time dedicated for Un-Conference where participants were free to raise their questions/comments related to Cloud Frameworks. We had some interesting and free-flowing discussions during this period wherein questions ranged from whether/how Cloud can help Parallel Computation of Research Based huge data sets to feedback request from Java Developers on desired improvements in J2EE specifications to make Java a more cloud friendly language and platform.

Day 2 Summary

Second day started with 2 Key note addresses from amongst the strongest players in Cloud Platforms. One was by Janakiram MSV, Technical Architect at Microsoft and another was by Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist at Amazon Web-Services. Janakiram presented an overview of Microsoft’s Azue Platform and Simone gave us details about the entire gamut of offerings from Amazon to satisfy different needs of different customers.

Next in line was another session from our colleague Vikas. This time, Vikas presented on Multi-Tenancy in Cloud. He started with general concepts and complexities involved around building a multi-tenant SaaS application and how things have evolved with the arrival of Cloud Platforms. He then went on explaining different techniques for implementing multi-tenancy in Cloud. The entire presentation can be accessed at

I presented first post-lunch session on Testing Techniques available on / for Google App Engine. First part of my presentation was focussed for developers writing applications for Google App Engine and how they can test various aspects involving Google provided Infra-structure services in their local environment using Google Testing API. In the second part, I presented about Google Cloud Cover, a framework recently released by Google which allows us to run test suites of different types applications on Google App Engine. The entire presentation can be accessed at

Followed was another presentation from Clogeny Technologies, where Chirag Jog presented an impressive Case-Study about how they were able to move a Desktop application over to Cloud without much changes in the design and architecture of the application.

Last presentation of the conference was from Vineet Mago and Naresh Khalasi, from Vayana. Both of them had very interesting facts and remediations to suggest about different kind of threats / security pitfalls to keep in mind while moving an application over to Cloud. The session was one of the most interactive sessions in the entire conference where lot of people had different opinions though I must say both Vineet and Naresh pulled off this controversial topic with lot of ease and conviction.

If interested, all the presentations are available at Conference web-site

Concluding Thoughts

I really enjoyed the entire conference. Sessions were diverse and catered to different aspects of Cloud frameworks. There were lot of practitioners of different Cloud frameworks in the conference which gave me good chance to interact and learn from their experiences. One possible area of improvement I could see was to have more of developer focussed sessions where participants could have done some hands on as well.

Overall very happy to spend 2 days in Pune sharing our experiences and learning from our peers. Many thanks to Harshad, Sangeeta and rest of the team for organizing yet another successful event and looking forward to attending more of these in near future.