Thinking Out Cloud

CloudCamp in the Cloud - Oct 22

The organizers of the very successful CloudCamp events have put together a new virtual event called CloudCamp in the Cloud, which takes place next week. I've been to a few physical CloudCamps and they are great events, so I expect this online one to be good as well. Worth attending.

Here are the details:

CloudCamp, organizer of the community-based cloud computing unconference series, today announced that it’s 
taking its popular event series virtual with the forthcoming “CloudCamp in the Cloud CloudCamp in the Cloud, to be held Thursday, October 22, 2009 from 12 noon to 3 pm Eastern Standard Time, builds upon the original live CloudCamp format providing a free and open place for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. Using an online meeting format, attendees will exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies.

There are a number of opportunities to get involved with CloudCamp in the Cloud:

• ATTEND – Attending CloudCamp in the Cloud is free, fun and informative. Register now at http://bit.ly/UKbc1.
• PRESENT – CloudCamp in the Cloud encourages community presentations. If you have a cloud-related topic to discuss, visit the http://bit.ly/2NNh5l page to submit a proposal.
• SPONSOR – CloudCamp depends on corporate sponsors who provide financial assistance and other valuable donations. Current CloudCamp in the Cloud sponsors include Citrix, Enomaly and Appistry. If you would like to sponsor CloudCamp in the Cloud, please contact Reuven Cohen.
• ORGANIZE – CloudCamp is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization. If you'd like to help facilitate CloudCamp in the Cloud, letting us know about your interest by emailing cloudcamp@googlegroups.com.
• SPREAD THE WORD – Help share the news about CloudCamp in the Cloud, by retweeting this announcement (hashtag: #cloudcamp), blogging about the event, and linking to the main information page at http://bit.ly/3wBgyI.
  

Related Links
[1] http://bit.ly/UKbc1 [CloudCamp in the Cloud Registration]
[2] http://twitter.com/cloudcamp [CloudCamp on Twitter]
[3] http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10128776220 [CloudCamp on Facebook]

Contacts
Program

• Dave Nielsen, (415) 531-6674, dave -at- platformd -dot- com
  

Sponsorships:

• Reuven Cohen, (212) 203 4734 x102, ruv -at- enomaly -dot- com
  

Media:

• Sam Charrington, (415) 727-1850, sam -at- appistry -dot- com
  

About CloudCamp
CloudCamp was formed in 2008 in order to provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. Through a series of local CloudCamp events, attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies. CloudCamp has served over 5,000 CloudCampers in more than 50 events all over world, in cities like Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bangalore, Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, Stockholm and Singapore.

Yahoo and Cloudera Discuss Hadoop Next Week

My friend Dekel Tankel sent me some information about the next Hadoop user group, which takes place at the Yahoo campus in Santa Clara on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Sounds like an interesting line up and agenda:

6-6:15 - Socializing and Beers

6:15-6:45 - Mumak - Using Simulation for Large-scale Distributed System Verification and Debugging
Hong Tang - Yahoo!

Large-scale distributed systems such as MapReduce are notoriously hard to verify & debug. An effective approach to address many of these challenges is through simulation. In this talk, I am going to present Mumak, a MapReduce simulator, including its design and implementation, early experience how it is useful, and point out some future work.

6:45-7:15 - Cloudera Desktop in Detail
Philip Zeyliger, Cloudera

7:15-7:45 - Karmasphere Studio: A graphical IDE for Hadoop

7:45-8:00 Q&A and Open Discussion

RSVP here.

The Cloud Computing Show with Gary Orenstein

Last week I joined Gary Orenstein, host of the The Cloud Computing Show podcast, and Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio for a podcast recording of Gary's show. It's worth a listen (if I do say so myself). We discuss some of the latest news around cloud computing (OSCON, Rackspace API, Microsoft Azure pricing and more) and of course talk about Twilio, which I have written about in the past as What's Really Exciting About Cloud Computing.

At the end of each show, Gary does this thing where he asks eah of his guests to recommend a cloud service they like, and he contributes one as well.

Here's what we each recommended (I cheated and recommended two):

• Gary: http://bit.ly/ (URL shortening and tracking)
• Jeff: Get Achievements http://www.getachievements.com/ (instant recognition programs)
• Geva:New Relic http://www.newrelic.com/ (performance monitoring) and Good Data http://www.gooddata.com/

(easy analytics)
Listen to the podcast here.

Enterprise Cloud Summit

I'll be speaking on a panel at the upcoming Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas (@Interop), May 18-19. The topic of the panel is "Where Can Things Go Wrong?" and should be anice conversation with the moderator Greg Ness and these panelists:

Peter Coffee, Director, Platform Research, salesforce.com
Randy Rowland, General Manager, Managed Hosting & Cloud Computing Services, Terremark Worldwide, Inc.
Geva Perry, Founder, Thinking Out Cloud
Bill McGee, Vice President, Products and Technology, Third Brigade

The rest of the agenda also looks very interesting. Check it out here. And there's also a CloudCamp event on Monday evening.

If you haven't signed up already, you can register here and get a 40% discount.

Hope to see you there.

Call for Companies: Under the Radar, Cloud Computing

I spoke to the folks organizing the Under the Radar event (April 24, Mountain View, CA), which is focused on cloud computing. They already have a very impressive line-up of companies presenting, but they are looking for more.

Here's the info the organizers sent me:

we’re looking for startups who are still “under the radar” and looking to get in front of CIOs, CTOs, VPs Technology at companies like AT&T, Getty Images, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc, as well as VCs, industry press etc.
 
This is the link to apply: http://www.undertheradarblog.com/nominate-to-present/
We’re looking for startups in: Platforms | Virtualization | Saas | Collaboration | Business Apps | and more... Deadline is March 20.

About the event:  http://undertheradarblog.com

For anyone looking to understand the cloud space and see who’s innovating AND who’s buying -  this is a one-day deep dive into what’s happening.

The current line-up of companies is quite impressive with some of the hot up & comers out there, including Heroku, New Relic, Twilio, Sauce Labs, cTera, Zuora and others. The judges also like an impressive bunch with folks from big companies such as my buddy James Urquhart from Cisco, Joe Weinman from AT&T and Matthew Glotzbach from Google, as well as prominent journalists and venture capitalists.

For those who just want to attend, I understand they are still selling tickets at the early bird price. You can find them here: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=165707

Looking forward to the event and seeing you all there.

Upcoming Cloud-Related Events

[UPDATE (Jan 22, 2009): I added more events thanks to commenters and people who sent me via email. I also put up a permanent page (not a blog post) that will keep an updated list of events at http://gevaperry.typepad.com/main/upcoming-cloud-computingrelated-events.html]

[UPDATE (Jan 26, 2009): Added the Powered by Cloud event in London]

[UPDATE (Feb 3, 2009): Added two more events - check out updated events page at link above]

In the next few months, we'll see a plethora of cloud computing-related events all over the world. I thought it would be helpful if I give a list of some of those I've noticed and I am sure there are others I haven't. CloudCOnnect started last night in what I thought was an extremely successful panel in an innovative format. Three cloud vendors -- Amazon, Google and Saleforce.com -- pitched their cloud offerings to four CIOs of large enterprises and government agencies. The cloud vendors then had to take questions on stage from the prospective customers.

CloudConnect 2009 - January 20-22, Mountain View, CA

Cloud Camp Atlanta - January 20, Atlanta, GA

Cloud Camp Singapore - January 21, Singapore

Cloud Computing Innovation Day - January 27, Santa Clara, CA

Cloud Camp Indianapolis - January 28, Indianapolis, IN

Powered by Cloud - February 2-3, London, UK

Open Group's Enterprise Cloud Computing Summit- February 3, San Diego, CA

Open Group's Security Practitioner's Conference - February 4-5, San Diego, CA

5th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group - February 10, Waltham, MA

Cloud Computing: An IT Paradigm Shift - February 11, Toronto, Canada

Cloud Camp Toronto - February 11, Toronto, Canada

Ahead in the Clouds - February 18-19, San Diego, CA

Cloud Camp London - March 12, London, UK

Cloud Computing Expo New York - March 30 - April 1, New York, NY

Cloud Camp Minneapolis - April 18, Minneapolis

Cloud Slam 2009 - April 20-24, online conference

Under the Radar: Cloud Computing - April 24, Mountain View, CA

Enterprise Cloud Summit (part of Interop Las Vegas) - May 17-21, Las Vegas, NV

Velocity '09 - June 22-24, San Jose, CA

Structure '09 - June 25, San Francisco, CA

If you know of other interesting events, please let me know in the comments to this blog and I will add them to the list.

Big Cloud Week Coming Up

Next week is shaping up to be a big week for cloud computing (again). 

Monday

Microsoft will be making an announcement in San Francisco about the launch of Online Services. I've been invited to attend that as well as a Blogger Roundtable that Microsoft is hosting for cloud computing bloggers. Should be interesting.

In the evening, Joyent is hosting Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar: Addressing the Practical Questions of CIOs and CTOs. I will be participating in a a panel entitled The Future of Cloud Computing for the Enterprise, moderated by Jason Hoffman, CTO at Joyent.

Tuesday

On Tuesday (10 AM PST), GigaSpaces and CohesiveFT are hosting a joint webinar entitled Cloud Enablement with Security and Control. The highlight of this webinar is a wicked cool live demo of running a web application across two public clouds (Amazon EC2 and Flexiscale) with the ability to scale out on demand based on SLAs, fail-over, self-healing -- all in a secure environment. So as the Cohesive guys wrote on their blog, make sure to brush up on your cloud computing buzzwords, because we will show it all: cloudbursting, cloud storming, cloud spanning, virtual private clouds, hybrid clouds, interclouds -- you name it.

You can read more details on Nati's blog and Dekel's blog. Sign up here.

Wednesday-Friday

Sys-con's Cloud Computing Expo will take place in San Jose. Seems like everyone is coming in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meet a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum get together around this event as well as a Silicon Valley CloudCamp.

So it's going to a fun week. If anyone wants to get together at one of these events, just let me know in the comments or via twitter.

Speaking at the Virtualization Conference

The folks at Syscon's Virtualization Conference accepted my speaking proposal for the conference (see abstract below). My session is on Monday, June 23, at 6:25 PM. It's at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC. I will show a live demo of an application built on GigaSpaces running on Amazon EC2. Here's the abstract:

The Missing Piece in Cloud Computing: Middleware Virtualization — To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.

QCon, Drinks on Tuesday

Looking forward to a great Qcon San Francisco conference this week. Kudos to Floyd Marinescu and the rest of the team for putting together a pretty cool speaker roster and agenda.

As Nati wrote, a bunch of us are getting together Tuesday evening for drinks and some tapas at the Thirsty Bear to kick things off. We'll start hanging out at 6:00 PM and see where it takes us. Everyone's invited!

Hope to see you there.

BTW, wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't mention the panel and presentation sessions given by GigaSpaces folks at the event. Check them out here. We'll be making a big announcement during this event. Stay tuned...

GigaSpaces Customer Conference: Blow-by-Blow

Nati wrote an excellent post with a "blow by blow" of the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference we organized in London a couple of weeks ago.

This is an interesting read because Nati gives brief descriptions of the many success stories of using GigaSpaces that our customers and partners presented there. Also gives you a sense of how widely applicable Space-Based Architecture is.

We're planning a similar event for the U.S. on October 9, 2007 in New York. More on this to come.