Next week sees me winging my way to Santa Clara to attend CloudConnect. While there I’ll be involved with two sessions that I’m really excited about. The first is on Tuesday at 2:30 and it deals with an area of real interest to me, the intersect between Cloud Computing and OpenSource. Nearly three years ago I wrote a post conceiving off a combination between OpenSource and, Clud (in this case SaaS specifically). It was a post that got a fair bit of feedback and one which I still ruminate on. The precis of the session s as follows;
Where would the web be without Linux, Apache, MySQL and the pervasive PHP, Python and Perl? The Berkley Internet Domain Name (BIND) gave us the ability to easily transcribe IP addresses to human-readable names. Sendmail allowed us to send email from system to system instantaneously. These technologies helped define the Internet but their model of transparent free and open source development allowed them to become pervasive. Just as with the web, open source is one of the core foundations of cloud computing—achieving an unprecedented level of scale at a bare-bones cost that had never been seen in the history of computing. The first movers in cloud computing services found the open source software model most appealing, but to businesses today the attraction of open source is about the ability to develop a more flexible infrastructure and avoid vendor lock-in that often results from proprietary systems. This panel of leading cloud computing and open source practitioners will share their experiences on how they are helping their customers accelerate their entry into the cloud computing market as well as offer insight into how and where open source will continue to shape the cloud over the next few years.
I’m looking forward to talking to some smart folks about this – we have Randy Bias from CloudScaling, Peder Ulander from Cloud.com, Zack Urlocker (famously from MySQL) from Zendesk and Bret Piatt from Rackspace – there’s bound to be lots of interesting perspectives on how to make money out of free heard at the session.
Next up I’m running a Birds of a Feather session on Tuesday evening at 6pm. Shlomo has written an awesome post illustrating what we’ll be covering. Basically we’re going to cover several themes and look at them through the different Cloud Computing lenses – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. We’ll be looking at things like data portability, monitoring and control and the avoidance of vendor lock in and we’ll be doing it individually for the different parts of the stack o really nail down issues specific to that level. It’s a cool concept and I’m looking forward to it. Shlomo has created the matrix below to illustrate the different topics and themes.
CloudConnect is always a great chance to get all of the Clouderati in one room – last year it was like a school reunion, this year I’m expecting it to be even better!
