Here’s a first….blogging from a beanbag chair surrounded by a few thousand people. Hey, it’s Cloudstock…why not. I finished up sessions for the day. Overall, I was very impressed at the quality of this show…especially for the price…and I think it was a hit for the rest of the crowd.

I wouldn’t call the sessions overly technical. But then again, they were only 45 minutes long…not long enough for a deep dive. The Amazon Web Service session was more of a presentation of the AWS catalog, and they offer an awful lot. One thing that I particularly liked: their Free Tier. As with many cloud offerings, they want to eliminate the cost of entry: get your service up and running, build a customer base, and start paying after one year of use. Not bad. I also liked the graphic showing the almost impossible task of forecasting your infrastructure expense in a non-cloud business model. Overestimate and you’ve wasted a lot of money on unused horse power. Underestimate and you’ve started your business with unhappy customers. And it’s not like you can adjust quickly.

The Twilio presentation on pricing your SaaS offering was totally non-technical. But it hit on a topic that all of us cloud developers are thinking about. The fad of ad-supported (or VC funded) free services is not viable for most of us. So he had some great tips on how to find the right price point.

Zuora looks like it has a pretty nice offering if you’re an ISV on the AppExchange. They’ve come up with a hassle free solution for setting up automated subscription payments…including the process to enable active licenses once a customer pays. A big pain point for small app creators. I plan to learn more about them at the expo.

And I totally missed the last session…talking to too many people. But that’s what it’s all about, right.

Gotta go…there’s food.