I'm just back from speaking at CLASS (Cloud Assisted Services) Conference in Bled, Slovenia, where I was asked to speak on the Red Hat vision on Cloud. Ales was also there talking about CapeDwarf and Trustin gave a tutorial on building applications on top of Infinispan. There were a lot of other speakers talking about their experiences and vision for Cloud, and it was good to meet some of them and see that our thoughts are in line with those of others. Unfortunately I was only able to spend a couple of days in the area and just one day at the conference, but it was still worth attending. Some areas of interest included listening to Ken Ducatel speaking about what the EU have planned in terms of security and authentication standards for all cloud vendors operating wthin the area, and then real world Cloud uses from Kate at Argonne National Laboratories and Christine from AmpLab.

But another important reason for attending the conference was that it was my first time in Slovenia and to meet the entire team based in the area. I was already impressed with the team (hey, they're JBoss engineers, so what else should you expect ?), but Slovenia was much more beautiful that I had expected. Upon reflection, if I'd done my homework or been awake on the flight from Paris to Ljubljana airport, I'd have seen much of this from the air. However, I didn't and it was a very pleasant surprise. I hope to have further opportunities to visit the area in the future and next time I'll spend more than a couple of days!