This weekend, as our American readers prepare for Independence Day (while the rest of the world grunts and shrugs its shoulders), we're going to try something a little different. It's been an exciting couple of weeks in the Cloud zone, and we wanted to give you a chance to speak your minds and be heard.

That's why we're starting our first open thread — in the hopes that our community will... commune with one another in an unstructured way. We're going to provide a few possible talking points, but you're free to comment on anything you want that happens to be related to cloud computing.

Conferences

• AWS re:Invent opened up registration for the late November conference.

• Red Hat held a successful and informative duo of conferences — DevNation and the Red Had Summit.

• DockerCon happened. 

Hot Topics

• According to our metrics, you all want to know a lot more about serverless architecture. It makes sense — it's a natural evolution of cloud computing. Rest assured, we've taken notice.

• A lot of readers also took note of John Basso's take on both Microsoft Azure and cloud architecture in general.

• And finally, it wouldn't be the Cloud zone without a mention of containers. There wasn't much Docker content this week, but that's probably because it all got used up last week at DockerCon.

In any case, those are just some ideas to get you started. Did anything catch your eye? Is there something you want to know more about? Talk among yourselves in the comments, and enjoy your weekend!