Today’s Great Open Cloud Shootout was great fun — at least for me! I had the pleasure to tease these distinguished gentlemen with cloudy questions:

• Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, Sun Microsystems
• Monty Taylor, MySQL Drizzle Geek, Sun Microsystems
• Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL hacker, craigslist
• Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda
• Thorsten von Eicken, CTO, RightScale
• Prashant Malik, Cassandra Dude, Facebook
• Mike Culver, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

I tried to provoke the panelists with questions around some areas I had thought out:

• So, what is a cloud anyway?
• Who is the cloud for?
• Why use the cloud?
• Cloud adoption barriers
• Are there cloud standards?
• Cloud Business Opportunities
• Cloud Competition
• Databases & Clouds
…

The last couple of years, I have had the pleasure of moderating panels at the MySQL Conference. Last year, it was about scaling MySQL, and the year before that, it was the Clash of the DB Egos.

For this year, the original plan was for a MySQL Roadmap Shootout. Many of these questions Karen Tegan Padir should address in her opening keynote, and Robin Schumacher and Rob Young will dig deeper in “The Future of MySQL“.

Hence, we decided to aim higher: We’re going for the clouds. This year’s new topic is “ …