AWS Cloud Worshop, Chennai Event

November is rainy season in Chennai, despite it we at Amazon Web Services Enthusiasts and Users Group Chennai decided to host a AWS Cloud Workshop on Nov 10. While the Chennai infrastructure got clogged due to rains, (web)Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) was discussed in-depth at the Workshop and Unconf.
The event had a record, runaway registration(170+), we had to change the venue just couple of weeks before the event to accommodate the overwhelming interest. Despite heavy downpour and traffic-congession, 100+ AWS Users attended the session. Here is audience in rapt attention absorbing the tech-gork rain:

The workshop was led by Jinesh Varia based out of Seattle from the Amazon Web Services Developer Relationship Team.

Here is an excellent summary of Jinesh’s session by Veerabahu ( @veechand)

We had a vibrant unconference session was led by Kiruba. Here is @Kiruba doing the slap-thy-neighbor unconf ritual.

The AWS user community came alive during the unconference to tell their story in lightning talk format:

The first session was by Bhasker V Kode of Hover.in. Here are the slides from Bhasker’s session:

View this document on Scribd

Followed by Hiran of MarketSimplified.com. They are the finalists of Blackberry Challenge and they leveraged AWS to overcome the mobile device limitations – a very good use case for cloud!

The Anantara team made a short talk on their elastic monitoring and management console.
Murthy and Sam from CSS Labs presented on Enterprise Cloud = Private Cloud + Public Cloud. Tools and Techniques. Eucalyptus and AWS EC2 are mixed and matched to make use of the internal as well as public infrastructure. Earlier in the forenoon session, Ezhil head CSS Labs made a presentation on taming the API with GUI featuring CloudBuddy platform.

Senthil Nayagam(@senthilnayagam) of RailsFactory‘s talk was a welcome break from the AWS Kool-Aid.
There were impromptu talks by Harish Ganesan, CTO 8KMiles outlining their biz model and Balamurugan, Excelsoft explaining their use-case.

Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan, President, Vembu.com gave a crisp overview of their online backup consumer offering. The unconference ended with Lux playing the video of their viral video CloudCloud Maybe and a short talk on ‘Making of Cloud Cloud Maybe’ LOLZ.

Here is me doing impromptu compeering ( Kiruba was not able to attend the morning session – so the mantle fell on my shoulders!)

Overall the event is a huge success in many count, except for the WiFi glitch due to equipment failure there were no major shortcomings. Yet there is enormous scope for improvement.

I’d like to thank the CSS team the excellent co-operation and Anantara for TIDEL venue coordination.

Hat tip to Gayathri for coming all the way from Bangalore and helping in coordinating the event.

Bonus Links:
CSS Labs Blog post on the event.
Twitter Hastag.