The Sundance Film Festival kicked off this week in Park City, Utah and the buzz is palpable. Long considered a critical launch pad for independent filmmakers, the Festival has gained massive mainstream exposure in recent years thanks to a host of new promotional vehicles at filmmakers’ disposal—from the growing popularity of television’s Sundance Channel to the ability to view Sundance-related content on the web, and, of course, the indescribable influence of social media.

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The market for on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure services that turn IT into a utility for businesses continues to expand rapidly. While initial use cases for such cloud services have been for application development and testing environments, the success of that model over the past few years is leading many companies to broaden their usage of outsourced cloud services. In fact, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, Gartner forecasted that by the end of 2011 these services will account for almost 25% of the overall hosting market.

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The saying goes that ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ – but what happened at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is no secret and will soon show up as devices and services in places ranging from our hands to our kitchen cupboards.

As an annual event, CES has evolved from highlighting the latest consumer entertainment products to becoming an industry blockbuster event where major new products are introduced and technology trends are set for the coming year.
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Saying that I had a great time presenting at the Drupal 7 Release Party is an understatement. This event was sponsored by skyshi.com and inkuiri.com, and it’s great to see so many Indonesian people, like myself, excited about the bright future of Drupal with it’s formidable release, “Version 7”.  There were more than 120 enthusiastic people there for the event, and many topics were covered, including some of the great features of Drupal 7:

• Integrated Admin interface
• Much Faster Performance than Drupal 6
• Ability to define custom content structure and more…

During my presentation I showed the newly redesigned Voxel website, all built using Drupal 7.  There was a lot of interest on how to deploy Drupal on a cloud computing platform like Voxel’s VoxCLOUD.   So I took the opportunity to show some of the features we are using to power Voxel’s site, including:

• Load Balancing with VoxCLOUD between our New York and Singapore cloud centers
• Leveraging a global MySQL Master/Slave replication setup using Drupal’s database abstraction layer
• How offloading content to the VoxCAST CDN helps improve performance for global users.  We covered several approaches to handling CDN with Apache, including Voxel’s own mod_cdn
• Team Development guidelines with Drupal Development (Voxel’s web team is split between New York, Singapore and Indonesia!).

In the coming weeks, we’ll be diving deep into these specifics topics in order to highlight techniques for supercharging your Drupal site using Voxel hosting services — we’ve been working with Drupal 7 since the early alpha days and we’re really happy with Drupal’s full release and have plenty of tricks that we’re ready to share.   We’re also excited to see that the Drupal folks considered Voxel’s site design to be the best yet for Drupal 7 and featured us on the Drupal 7 homepage, so hats off to our designer, Felix Widjaja and Whiteboard Media, for making the site really easy on the eyes.

Also I want to sent a few props out to some people like Viking Karwur, who represents Mozilla Indonesia, and claimed that he’d never seen such enthusiasm in his company’s events like we had at the Drupal 7 Indonesia launch. Also, the CEOs of two non-affiliated websites, Filmoo.com and Komikoo.com, both of which have started to gain attention in Indonesia. Nokia Indonesia rep Erick also showed some support at the gathering organized by our local Drupal expert, Rizqinofa.  Thanks guys for making such an awesome event!

When it comes to the adoption of cloud services, the research numbers are piling up. A recent Connected Planet article outlined data from three organizations that combine to support the general trend of enterprises moving – quickly – to the cloud:

• 72% of U.S. IT decision makers plan to expand their cloud services in the next 12 months (CompTIA)
• 32% of large enterprise respondents in the U.S. and Europe rated cloud computing as a 3 or 4 on a scale where 4 means high importance (Ovum)
• The rate of growth of server purchases has decreased for small and medium businesses in 12 countries as they are increasingly relying on outsourced cloud services (AMI)

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In recent months, there has been a groundswell of urgency around IPv6 as IPv4 addresses fall to critically low levels – below the 5% mark, according to the Number Resource Organization.

So, after years of discussion and a lot of hype, it looks like IPv6 is finally arriving … and fast! At this point, the only question is “when”, and I think we’re going to see carriers, enterprises and device manufacturers alike dramatically accelerate their support efforts.
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