Java One was Cloud Crazy

I went to Java One last week and was a bit surprised by the amount of cloud chatter. I expected to hear a lot about Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy on stage together. I expected melancholy predictions that this would be the last Java One. I did not expect to hear everyone talking about cloud computing. Don't get me wrong, I knew that Sun was going to talk about cloud computing. The Sun booth had several stations dedicated to the subject and the Sun store was selling cloud t-shirts. The thing that got me was how many participants were talking about the cloud. All of the technical sessions that had anything to do with cloud computing were packed. Even more surprising was the fact that the sessions extolled the virtues of Amazon EC2 even though Sun is working on their own Cloud offering. I sat through three sessions where the first half hour was dedicated to “Amazon 101”. It looks like Amazon is where real solutions are being created for now but there is definitely competition on the way.