BROOMFIELD, Colo. – It’s a good thing a 15-hour buffer separated Day 1 and Day 2 of Gluecon, as many attendees noted brain rest was much needed after a packed first-day agenda.
The second day kicked off with veteran database architect Max Schireson of 10gen, who also spent many years with Oracle, opening with a session dubbed “Re-inventing the Database.” Nothing like a little perspective for “all these young whipper-snappers” (as one tweeter noted), on how and why things have changed to get us to the NoSQL movement we know today. Much of the talk was on Schireson’s favorite topic: MongoDB.
James Urquhart, VP of strategy at enStratus, spoke passionately about complexity. He used the example of trading algorithms and the “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, to illustrate how complex infrastructure can have disastrous results.
“The Internet, APIs and cloud are all about interconnectedness,” Urguhart said. These “complex adaptive systems” require cooperation by cloud computing vendors. “Embrace complex systems and systems thinking,” Urquhart added, calling for more investment to address the interconnectedness of the cloud to ensure we don’t suffer complex systems disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
“Don’t let this happen to you,” he said, showing a slide with that big, smoking fireball.
Brian Campbell, principal architect at Ping Identity, spoke to a full room on OAuth and why it matters for mobile. His talk was subtitled “Securing Your Pocket to the Cloud” and dealt with the problems of social logins, mobile apps and how OAuth can help. Campbell contributes to various identity and security standards and is currently focused on OAuth 2.0 within the IETF. Another key point made: Some kind of identity or authorization is or will be needed by nearly every API.
Big data was a topic running through much of the Glue conference. John DeGoes, CEO of Precog, spoke about “Big Data, Smart Apps – and How Big Data Is Ushering in the Era of AI.” His firm’s database is designed for solving arbitrary problems in analytics, statistics and machine learning. Precog provides infrastructure APIs designed to help developers “incorporate mind-blowing intelligence and insight into their applications.” It’s designed for storing never-ending streams of event-oriented data, such as clicks, measurements, tweets and transactions. Big data is ushering in the era of mainstream artificial intelligence, DeGoes said.
Wrapping up the final day of Gluecon was another session focusing on APIs. Alistair Farquaharson, CTO of SOA Software, spoke about the benefits of APIs for businesses of any kind, not just software firms. Farquaharson sees APIs as a more business-oriented form of SOA technology. His firm’s new API management offering for enterprises, Atmos.phe.re, is a secure platform designed to let midsize to large firms share their APIs with the growing developer community.
And a vibrant, growing developer community it is, well represented by 498 attendees from around the world who converged for two and half intense days in Broomfield. They learned, they shared, they partied and had fun. And now they’re all back home creating even more cool stuff.
Check out Graeme Thickins live blog from Gluecon here
