Gluecon 2010 Intro Video from Digital Alchemy on Vimeo.

 After watching the Lakers finish off the Sun's, I’ve found downtime to reflect on a good conference, Gluecon. There were plenty of tracks for geeking out to and so much schwag in the bag that I was able to tattoo my notebook with my favorite stickers (still looking for a free Ubuntu sticker for my dual boot). It was certainly an event that was focused to a core audience of developers. There were a few things that I came away with; the proliferation of API’s and the disconnect that seemingly exists between the IT/engineering teams and the business. Why else would there be a session ‘5 Things I Hate about your API-TOS’?

This week I am attending GlueCon, a conference devoted solely to solving web-application integration. The agenda looks pretty interesting from both techincal and business perspectives. I'll be attending most of the architecture sessions and posting my notes here. If you couldn't be here and want to follow the discussions real-time, the hash is #gluecon and I'll be tweeting from Apigent on twitter

Monitoring cloud performance is different from on premise application servers. For starters, you can’t put a SNMP agent up there; can’t monitor WMI classes either. Shoot, you may not even have an IP address. So how would you monitor cloud applications? Here are three ways:

Recently I read a blog post of Chet Kapoor titled The future of the indirect channel in a Cloud enabled world. In the article, the new role of VAR's is positioned as Systems Integrator (SI). Why? Because the indirect channel knows your environment. We see past the marketing messages of Cloud proponents and look at your specific business needs. One of the key needs is that clouds somehow talk to one another.