I quite enjoyed Architect Insight this year - lots of useful sessions, and in particular the keynotes - which were mainly thinking about the issues surrounding the delivery and scaling of cloud services - were engaging and interesting.

If you were there, hopefully you enjoyed my session with Paul Dawson from Conchango - thanks very much Paul! - thinking about user experience for consumers and enterprise users.

The main things I took away this year:

• AtomPub is important. There's a lot of standardisation of Microsoft services on AtomPub and it seems to me that it will be increasingly important to understand and use this.
• POA. A new acronym: "Pod-Oriented Architecture". A Pod is defined as a unit in a datacenter capable of running an entire cloud service. So, to scale out, you just keep adding new pods.
• Brewer's Conjecture. This is the notion that one of Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance has to be traded away when designing distributed/cloud systems.
• Simon Thurman's 20/20 (20 slides lasting 20 seconds each) format session was very successful.
• Thinking about the use of cloud services from an enterprise perspective is a challenge.