Well, my week in California is over. The first thing I noticed when I got there was that it wasn't all that warm - not much warmer than Glasgow. It got warmer as the week went on, but apparently it's a common misconception that Northern California is warm. I was in Santa Clara for the 3rd Openstack Conference and Design Summit. This is where the Openstack community gets together to present on recent features and to discuss upcoming ones. Some interesting Keynotes including eBay showing some great charts on how to drive up overall in-house server utilisation and using cloud-bursting for extra capacity, as well as a great demo of Dell's Crowbar, taking 5 completely blank servers and having a Nova install running on them all controlled by Crowbar and Chef.

The real meat of the conference was the Design Summit part though, getting in to the technical aspect of it. As usual, 80%+ of discussion is about the Nova project, which I haven't at this stage had a chance to try, but I hope to change that soon. Swift had a few good sessions too, discussing a new in-development feature to replicate content from one cluster to another - allowing the often requested ability to mirror content between geographically separate areas. Can't wait to give that a go when I get back to work. Introductions to some new Rackspace work - Database-as-a-service running on Nova ("Project Red Dwarf") and Load Balancing ("Project Atlas") were good too.

I also got out once or twice - a tour of the local Best Buys looking for a charger for my camera which I'd forgotten to bring, as well as a drive up and down Amphitheatre Parkway (or perhaps the street next to it) and generally spotting big names on buildings. Oh, and the arcade machines at Dave and Busters were quite something. Doesn't seem to be like that where I am now, all the machines have handles.

Now, I'm off to blow all my remaining cash down in the casino.