Sun Tech Days, Pune
UPDATE: Entry from my partner in crime Pradhap who did the same session in Mumbai - http://blogs.sun.com/pradhap/
Sun Tech Days - India (21 - 23 Feb 2007), was held in four cities simultaneously this year. Hyderabad was the main location where nearly 7000 people attended the event over the course of 3 days. Delhi, Mumbai and Pune were the other three cities where a "mini-version" took place on the first day alone. This was a watershed event - The SINGLE LARGEST technical event in Indian History - 10000 people attending in all 4 cities !!!
I was missing the fun at Hyderabad by volunteering to go to Pune :-) Pune is one of the most tech-friendly places in India. Probably next in line after Bangalore and Chennai. But the DNA of the average Developer in Pune is very different from that of any other Indian City.
In Bangalore for example (home to the Largest OpenSolaris User Group in the World), it is almost impossible to find anyone between ages 17 and 30 who does not know Java ;-) Though we have a sizable opensolaris community (2 of whose members were speakers at Hyderabad !) here, we think it is possible to double, triple, or even x10 it ! That is despite the fact that there are not many professionals who work on Solaris as a part of their day job.
Now contrast that with Pune, where in a hall of 700-800 people, 1/3rd - 1/4th of the arms shot up when I casually asked for people who work on Solaris for their day jobs ! Thanks to the variety of Systems Software and Unix based companies in Pune. My Initial plan for the talk was 45 minutes of Solaris 10 features. What actually happened was 1.5 hours of DTrace and ZFS. The moment I explained DTrace, the crowd went wild - there were all sorts of questions.
- Why is this different from truss or strace ? Really ? Wow ! If it can poke into the kernel can it crash the kernel ? Hmm ....
- Will it slow you down ? So DTrace might drop probes to guarantee system stability and response right ? Aha ! Can I override that behaviour ? Its OK if my desktop crashes ;-). "-w" eh ? Can it do other destructive things ? I am getting naughty ....
- Can I write a network monitoring tool in DTrace ? But does the fbt provider guarantee interface stability ? No ? Is there a network provider then ? Oh Good ! I will wait for it ....
- Can you DTrace(verb) DTrace(noun) ? Hehe...
And when we went to ZFS, the geeks were literally eating out of my hand ;-). There were questions on *how* can ZFS do that array of mind-boggling things automagically. A little explanation on the design principles, the COW methodology and the ZFS test suite put all doubts to rest. Free Your Mind !
An old gentleman, Managing Director of a company who provide some solution on DOS (yep its not a typo) was insistent that we port ZFS to MS-DOG or atleast write a DOS emulator for Solaris. I think dosexec might help him or with FreeDOS looking stable and Xen coming into OpenSolaris, even THAT insane thing might become possible ! There were no holds barred for questions even after the talk was over. The crowd was very passionate and the session was productive to say the least !
If Bangalore can carry a great deal of momentum for OpenSolaris, Pune looks like a great bet where you can expect the "next big thing" from OpenSolaris in India to show up. But that needs some fostering to begin with. Is anyone from POSUG willing to take up the baton and wake up the sleeping giant ?
Posted at 08:03PM Feb 24, 2007 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun | Comments[1]
Posted by Pramod on February 26, 2007 at 04:28 AM GMT+00:00 #