QCon San Francisco 2010 Cloud Track

Back in July I wrote that I am hosting the QCon San Francisco Cloud Computing track this year and made an informal call for speakers.

Well, I wanted to update on the awesome line-up of speakers that we have for this event and offer my blog readers a $100 discount on registering to the conference, which takes place November 1-5 at the Westin San Francisco. The cloud track takes place all in one day on Friday, November 5.

To receive the $100 discount, sign up here with registration code PERR100.

Here's the agenda with detailed abstracts below. Hope to see you all there!

Track:	Real Life Cloud Architectures
Host	Geva Perry
10:35	Get Satisfaction uses Ruby on Rails and cloud computing platform to achieve scalability and reliability Thor Muller
12:05	Implementing private clouds Andrew Clay Shafer
14:05	Netflix’s Transition to High-Availability Storage Systems Siddharth Anand
15:35	Out of This World Cloud Computing John L. Callas & Khawaja Shams
16:50	Panel: Data in the Cloud Amr Awadallah & Roger Bodamer & Simon Guest &Damien Katz & Razi Sharir

 

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Host: Geva Perry

This track covers how a variety of applications are using Cloud computing today, with a focus on mature organizationss who have merged some aspect of cloud into their offerings rather than new/small companies which started out in the cloud. The aim of this track is to provide concrete takeaways for how to start using cloud computing in-house when you have an existing application to work with.

Presentation: "Get Satisfaction uses Ruby on Rails and cloud computing platform to achieve scalability and reliability"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Speaker: Thor Muller, CTO and Co-Founder, Get Satisfaction

Time: Friday 10:35 - 11:35

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract:

Get Satisfaction provides a customer community platform to help companies respond to customers’ questions, feedback, concerns, and praise – no matter where the conversation is taking place across the social web, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. With 5 million customers per month generating millions of monthly page views, scalability is a priority for Get Satisfaction. The company needed a cloud platform that would be able to keep up with its rapid growth rate, reduce the time and expense of infrastructure management, and improve upon slow deployment times that they had experienced with a dedicated infrastructure provider. Deploying the Get Satisfaction application to the cloud – not directly investing in hardware or heavy-duty architecture on the system side – allows the company to right-size its investment for growth.

Get Satisfaction chose to develop their applications with Ruby on Rails and has realized several benefits from using the fast-growing language and framework: agile methodology, test-driven, behavioral methodology, better code, reduced risk, and more performance visibility for the business. As a fast-growing start-up, Get Satisfaction wants a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider who would grow with them, while providing expert Rails advice. Get Satisfaction has been running on Engine Yard AppCloud since January 2010 – realizing the benefits of affordability, ease of deployment, higher performance and scalability, and 24/7 support.

Presentation: "Implementing private clouds"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Speaker: Andrew Clay Shafer, Cloud Building DevOps Guy, CloudScaling

Time: Friday 12:05 - 13:05

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract: On-demand virtualization is just the start in your private cloud journey.  Scalability and self-service mean building true horizontal cloud services that can be reused by all your enterprise applications.  Think GoogleFS or BigTable, Amazon SQS or RDS.  What do you need for a foundational baseline?  What services do you need on top of that baseline?  How do you communicate it to your enterprise IT department and as a worst case build it yourself?  We'll lay out what a complete private cloud ecosystem looks like and explore various options in a vendor neutral manner, beginning with virtualization and ending with PaaS-like capabilities deployable today.

Presentation: "Netflix’s Transition to High-Availability Storage Systems"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Speaker: Siddharth "Sid" Anand, Netflix Cloud Systems Team

Time: Friday 14:05 - 15:05

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract: The CAP Theorem states that it is possible to optimize for any 2 of Consistency, Availability, and Network Partition Tolerance, but not all three. Though presented by Eric Brewer in 2000 and proved in 2002, the CAP Theorem has only recently gained significant awareness and that primarily among engineers working on high-traffic applications. With spreading awareness of the CAP theorem, there has been a proliferation of development on AP (a.k.a. Available-Network Partition Tolerant) systems – systems that offer weaker consistency guarantees for higher availability and network partition tolerance. Much of the interest in these AP systems is in the social networking and web entertainment space where eventual consistency issues are relatively easy to mask. Netflix is one company that is embracing AP systems. This talk details Netflix’s transition to AWS SimpleDB and S3, examples of AP storage systems.

Presentation: "Out of This World Cloud Computing"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Speakers: Khawaja Shams, Software Engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory & John L. Callas, Project Manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project

Time: Friday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract:

The Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), originally designed for only 90 days of operation, have been roving the surface of Mars for over six years. They have trekked tens of kilometers, well beyond the 1000-meter design capability and sent back over a quarter million pictures from the surface of Mars. The infrequent communication links, once or twice a day, present operations challenges, but they also epitomize bursty utilization of computational resources. The planning cycles are often as short as 4 hours, where even an hour of data processing consumes precious operational schedule. Lastly, with a global community of scientists, distributing content efficiently to the entire team is essential in conducting seamless remote operations.

This session will present MER operations as an excellent candidate for cloud computing. MER is the first NASA mission to effectively utilize a public cloud computing infrastructure and realize its benefits. We will discuss the cloud applications we have built for storage, content delivery, searching, and data processing. Come learn how this great mission of exploration has been able to use cloud services in production to solve mission critical problems, while saving money and streamlining operations. We will also cover challenges associated with security and privacy, as well as designing our services to maximize uptime and minimizing cost.

Panel: "Data in the Cloud"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Moderator: Geva Perry

Panelists:

• Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera
• Roger Bodamer, SVP Products, 10Gen/MongoDB
• Simon Guest, Microsoft Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism
• Damien Katz, Creator of CouchDB and CouchOne Founder
• Razi Sharir, CEO, Xeround - SQL cloud database

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract: Scaling out the data tier has always been a challenge, but it is exacerbated in the cloud. By nature, cloud computing environments are dynamic and elastic. That, coupled with the fact that today's applications need to handle web-scale data volumes and transactions, makes the traditional approaches to data management unfeasible. This panel will discuss the unique challenges of managing data in the cloud -- and the solutions from a variety of perspectives: database-as-a-service, NoSQL, cloud-specialized relational databases and more.