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[WP_IMAGE]While reliability and security topped the agenda at the Cloudbeat 2011 conference held this week in Redwood City, the big ideas on the first day were more about how cloud development is setting up a decade-changing stage for application development.Allan Leinwand, CTO, Infrastructure Engineering at game maker Zynga explained why the maker of Farmville uses a hybrid, public-private cloud infrastructure (paraphrase: the public cloud is like a four-door sedan, great for most things except when you need a sports car, an 18-wheeler or a Winabago.)Byron Sebastian, Heroku GM and EVP at Salesforce talked about the 500% growth (now 500,000 applications) running on Heroku. “Customers want choice based on the business requirement. The fundamental decision is that they don’t want to be in the business of managing servers or even virtual instances.” Not surprisingly, Sebastian lead not with cost reduction, but with the idea that the compelling reason to move to PaaS is that organizations will be able to build new types of applicatons that you could not have built before using traditional develpment platforms.But coming back to the lead off for the Cloudbeat conference was Matt Marshall, Editor-in-Chief at VentureBeat in conversation with Adam Selipsky, VP Marketing, Sales, Product Management and Support at Amazon Web Services. Selipsky detailed Amazon’s operational and security track record in light of the AWS April 2011 East Coast outage. While Selipsky obviously put the best spin possible on the outage https://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Amazon-EC2-Outage-Disrupts-Service-at-Quora-Reddit-and-Others-136902/ I just thought about the track record of most private data centers. For the most part only the managers of these data centers know the true downtime stats. However, it seems to me that this is going to become a case of John Henry vs. the steam shovel. Industrial methods (cloud) will trump handicraft (on-prem).You can check out much of the conference here. http://venturebeat.com/category/cloud/