Thinking Out Cloud

Cloud Adoption Patterns - Citrix Synergy 2012 Keynote

This coming Thursday, May 10, I'll be giving one of the keynote speeches at the Citrix Synergy 2012 conference in San Francisco. My talk is in the morning and comes right after a distinguished speaker: Sameer Dholakia, GM of the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix.

You can see the description of the two talks (and the one by Citrix CEO Mark Templeton who speaks on Wednesday) on this Featured Speakers page. 

The title of my talk is "From the Bottom Up: Patterns of Cloud Adoption". Here's the abstract:

The current pattern of cloud adoption in the enterprise may surprise you. Rather than big, strategic, top-down decisions set by the CIO, cloud computing services – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – are being adopted primarily through a pattern of bottom-up adoption. Rank-and-file developers, IT administrators and business decision-makers are embracing cloud services and using them as a way to get their jobs done and drive the outcomes expected of them. In this talk, Geva Perry will explore this phenomenon, including its causes and the implications for the enterprise, as well as for vendors.

Regular readers of my blog know I write about this topic a lot (see recently Cloud Computing and SaaS Models Are About Bottom-Up Adoption and this post on the CloudSleuth Blog). In this talk, besides describing the phenomenon, I move a step further to discuss in more detail the implication of this adoption pattern to two groups: enterprise customers and SaaS/cloud vendors.

After the talk there will be a link to the video and slides. If you can't make it to Moscone on Thursday you can watch it live on the web from here:  http://live.citrixsynergy.com/sanfrancisco/

10 Predictions About Cloud Computing

Next week in Tel Aviv I'm going to participate in a panel about "the future of clouds", moderated by the legendary Yossi Vardi. In preperation, I wrote down a few of the concepts I've been thinking about for the past several years and I thought I would share them with my readers to get some feedback. Keep in mind these are long-term predicitions and trends (in no particular order).

1. PaaS Rules :IaaS becomes niche. In the long-run, IaaS doesn't make sense, except for a limited set of scenarios. All IaaS providers want to be PaaS when they grow up.


2. Public Rules: Internal clouds will be niche. In the long-run, Internal Clouds (clouds operated in a company's own data centers, aka "private clouds") don't make sense. The economies of scale, specialization (an aspect of economies of scale, really) and outsourcing benefits of public clouds are so overwhelming that it will not make sense for any one company to operate its own data centers. Sure, there need to be in place many security and isolation measures, and feel free to call them "private clouds" -- but they will be owned and operated by a few major public providers.


3. Specialized Clouds: There are many dimensions to an application: the pattern of its workload; the government regulations it must adhere to; the geographic access to it; the programmig language and framework it supports; the levels of security, performance and reliability it requires; and other more specialized requirements. It's not a one-size-fits-all world. At least, not always. There will be big generic clouds, and then, many specialized clouds. I've written about this in the past.


4. Government Regulation: The largest cloud providers will become nationally strategic infrastructure (like utilities, financials, telcos, airlines and shipping companies in the past). Given my "public rules" prediction above, cloud providers will become crucial infrastructure to the economy and the interests of their respective nations. They will become "too big to fail". Any change in their pricing will have a profound effect on the economy. And they will also hold the risk of a "cloud run" (similar to a "bank run", a sudden surge of demand they haven't anticipated. Not to mention the fact that they will maintain the sensitive data of consumers, corporations and government agencies. Any way you slice it, it spells regulation. But if history teaches us anything, this regulation will only come after "The Great Cloud Catastrophe" (use your imagination to figure out what that will look like). 


5. The Control vs. Freedom Debate: This sums up the story of cloud computing so far. Freedom is the catch-all phrase for drivers of cloud adoption (no upfront costs, on-demand, self-service, empowerment of the rank & file - e.g., developers), but control (or lack thereof) is the catch-all phrase of barriers to adoption by large enterprises. Every democratic country experiences this: there is sometimes a contradiction between the so-called sacred principles of rule-of-law and personal freedom. It's a matter of drawing the line -- and we're just in the beginning stages of understanding this issue when it comes to cloud computing. This debate will be with us for years to come and will shape the variety of enterprise cloud computing offerings.


6. Cloud Federations - While AWS has enjoyed tremendous international success, in any business that relies heavily on trust, such as IT, nothing beats a local brand. So people will flock to the cloud of their trusted national telco or big IT provider. But on the flip side, they will need to reach a global audience and will want servers around the world. As a result, we will see the formation of cloud federations, similar to what we see in airline alliances, such as Star, SkyTeam and Oneworld.


7. Financial Efficiency and Sophistication: Computing is a commodity, and every commodity ends up being traded, future-traded, brokered, arbitraged, speculated and manipulated with derivative instruments. The good: the market becomes very efficient. The bad: the market becomes complex and opaque. We are already seeing spot markets 


8. Cloud Standards: About two years ago there was a strong wave of interest and discussion about the need for cloud standards. I wrote then, and still believe, it is too soon. But it is also inevitable. We will, however, see multiple competing standards. At least one formal stanard specification from a standards body and several de facto standards from large commercial players such as Amazon and VMWare. 


9. The Ecosystem Wars: I've recently written about the importance of ecosystems in cloud computing. Success in building an ecosystem will be a determining factor in who wins and loses in the cloud. It is not just about the size and breadth of the ecosystem, but how well it all works together. In many ways, Amazon has done a poor job of this so far, but it has the one big compelling factor for an ecosystem: a very large install base. 


10. Horizontal and Vertical Consolidation: As with any industry, as cloud computing matures, it will consolidate. This will happen both horizontally, for example large IaaS players will roll-up regional and smaller IaaS and hosting providers, as well as vertically, for example IaaS providers will acquire cloud management system providers such as RightScale and enStratus.

I'd love to hear some feedback on these trends. Do you agree? Disagree? Have I left something out? Please let me know in the comments.

OpenStack Meetup - Diablo Release

This evening I'll be giving a brief presentation at the OpenStack SF Bay Area Meetup at the Caspian Tech Center in Sunnyvale. There are some other great speakers and the event is in celebration of the OpenStack Diablo release.

Check out the agenda and Meetup group.

Join Bay Area stacker community for the second quarterly meet and drink to celebrate the Diablo release, hear from OpenStack core team members, ecosystem partners and major enterprise users.

We’ll start at 7pm with open bar, food and mingling as usual. As a courtesy of Dave Nielsen and the Cloud Center, we’ll also offerguided cloud datacenter tours at the event location prior to start of speaker sessions.

7:30 to 8:30 we’ll have four 15-minute speaker sessions:

• Josh McKenty – Co-founder of OpenStack, project policy board member and CEO of Piston – will say a few words on what’s new and significant in Diablo release.

• Geva Perry – cloud blogger, advisor at Heroku, GigaSpaces, Xeround etc. – will offer his perspective on the significance of OpenStack as the new emerging standard in open source cloud computing.

• Jason Venner – Cloud Architect at X.com & eBay – will share his experience deploying and running OpenStack for X.com.

• Marc Padovani – Director of Product Management, HP Cloud Services – will talk about hpcloud.com announcement and HP's commitment to OpenStack. 

The event is free, but we’d appreciate if you can RSVP so we can plan food, drinks and seating capacity accordingly.

 

Video: Cloud Databases Panel at GigaOm Structure

Without further ado, here's he video of the cloud database panel I moderated earlier today at GigaOm Structure:

gigaomstructure on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

 

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.

 

QCon San Francisco 2010 Cloud Track

This year I will be hosting the QCon San Francisco Cloud Track. If you haven't attended QCon before, it's a high quality conference that takes place twice a year in London and San Francisco. The attendants are usually senior software development and IT executives, software architects and senior developers from enterprises and startups. The conferences are organized by the fine folks at InfoQ.

The theme of the cloud track this year will be Real-Life Cloud Architectures, with the focus being on production apps by larger organizations in the cloud. There will be five sessions all of which will take place on Friday, November 5, 2010.

The first presentation will be given by yours truly on selecting the right cloud provider (more details to come). Another presentation will be given by Randy Bias (@randybias) of Cloudscaling on the topic of building a private cloud. I don't want to give it away but Randy has some controversial views on the subject (and a lot of experience), so it's sure to be an interesting session.

Informal Call for Speakers

Although I have a few candidates for the other sessions, I'm still looking for speakers and panelists. In particular, I am looking for two things: a company that has migrated an existing production application to a public cloud and a company that has implemented a hybrid cloud application (meaning it runs both on-premise and in the cloud). 

If you would like to suggest yourself or someone else, please send me an email (if you have my address), leave a comment below, or contact me through Twitter or LinkedIN.

Hope to see you there!

APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers

On June 17 I gave a lightning presentation at the Open API Meetup, along with Evan Cooke of Twilio and Oren Teich of Heroku. It was a really nice event, well-organized by Sam Ramji and Shanley Kane of Sonoa/Apigee, and hosted at Twilio's beautiful new digs.

The title of my presentation was "APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers".  The gist of my presentation takes many of the elements I have written and spoken about in the past and puts them together in the context of the meetup's topic like this:

Just as we have seen with B2C, we are increasingly moving towards a "frictionless business model" with B2B products, including those targeting enterprises. This means that as a vendor you are trying to remove any barrier from the customer to acquire and succeed with your product.

To succeed with the frictionless business model, you have to adhere to a couple of principles:

Zero Touch

The idea here is to look at every phase of the customer interaction -- from demand generation, through customer acquisition and product delivery to customer success -- and eliminate touch points which create friction. A zero touch model has several benefits: it removes friction for the prospect/customer, making it easy to buy and use your product, and it also significantly reduces customer acquisition costs (CAC) and operating costs.

In the demand gen phase you want to rely heavily on inbound marketing such as SEO/SEM, social media etc. You're then bringing the prospect to your web site where they should be easily able to self-educate (with short video tutorials, easy documentation, etc.), sign up for a free trial and get up and running with something that provides value within minutes. You also remove barriers by providing flexible pricing (such as pay-as-you-go).

In the last phase, which I'll call "customer success", you want to find ways to provide low-touch/no-touch support, upgrading and up-selling/cross-selling.

There is a lot more to say about this topic and it's probably worth several dedicated blog posts, but you get the idea. I will add that although it sounds fairly obvious, it is not trivial to implement successfully.

Bottom-Up

This principle is less obvious. One of the implications of the frictionless model is that it relies on bottom-up adoption. So you are targeting not the CIO, business executives or central IT, as in the old days of enterprise software sales, but on the rank & file, whether business users, IT ops personnel or developers -- depending on the nature of the product.

With this point, I wanted to establish the fact that developers are becoming increasingly important when marketing your software (something I have written about several times before).

Product Delivery and the Frictionless Model

Given that the meetup was about APIs, I focused my presentation on product delivery. Over the years, software delivery has changed, increasingly removing friction from the process.

We can generally think of three main periods, I'll call them: High-Touch, Open and Cloud.

High-Touch Era

In this "classic enterprise" era, folks at big companies who had an interest in a certain software product couldn't touch that product without talking to a sales rep from the vendor. In addition, pricing was never revealed on the vendor web site and contracts were always one-offs that required prolonged negotiations.

You can easily see how this is a top-down model. It requires the involvement of legal, procurement, management authorizations, budgets, etc., and that's only to run a proof-of-concept.

But the delivery of the software product itself was an extremely high-touch approach. Software vendors "darkened the sky"¹ with professional services folks in an implementation project that would take weeks, months or sometimes years.

Open Era

But slowly, things started to change, especially as the Internet had started to become a mainstream, commercial medium. Some startups, such as WebLogic² (before it was acquired by BEA, before it in turn was acquired by Oracle), started offering B2B software for downloads on their web site. And as they did that, they were targeting developers, not executives. And they had to make it easy for people to help themselves with documentation freely available online (a novel concept then) and with easy access to support via email (another innovation).

I intentionally called it open era and not open source era, because source code was just one element of making B2B software products more easily accessible to developers. but certainly, the open source movement is an important part of this phase.

It is because of the removal of these adoption barriers that developers had access to software like never before. First, they downloaded and played around with it, the started developing with it -- next thing you know it's in a production application. I call this phenomenon "enterprise creep-up"³, and it explains much of the success of open source software such as MySQL and JBoss.

Cloud Era

(Not to be confused with Cloudera) 

Eventually, as both the business thinking evolved and web technology matured, we came to the realization that software doesn't need to be "delivered" at all. Instead, it's provided as a service. With the concepts of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, the idea expanded to raw IT resources, infrastructure software (OS, VMs, middleware, databases, etc.) and applications.

With this phase, almost any friction involving product delivery is removed. The user/customer does not need to download, install, configure and maintain software. There are no issues of OS and hardware versions. There is no hassle in upgrading -- upgrades happen behind the scenes and you benefit from them every time you log in.

This explains the massive success of Amazon Web Services, and particularly EC2. Developers had unfettered access to IT resources, which they could pay for by the drink and expense to their credit cards, without the need for any approvals. They started by kicking the tires, the prototyping, then developing -- next thing you know, there is a production application on the public cloud.

Software Delivery Models in the Cloud Era

So we now have a range of software delivery options, many of which I listed in Software Delivery Models in the Era of Cloud Computing. The list goes something like this:

• Professional Services 
• CDs 
• Downloads 
• Physical Appliances
• Virtual Appliances 
• Images for Internal Cloud 
• Images for External Cloud 
• Add-on/Plugin/Extension
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via Client 
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via GUI 
• Software-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service via API 

Developers and APIs

As we are moving to a world where software is delivered as a service, if you want developers to use or integrate your service with their applications, the preferred access method is an API (and as other speakers mentioned at the meetup, a RESTful API at that). An API is a programmatic (i.e., automated) way to access the service, and therefore, the most frictionless delivery method of all (at least when it comes to developers).

Tying It All Together

So with all this background out of the way, the point of my talk was quite straightforward: As developers are growing in influence in the purchasing cycle of software, and as we are trying to move to a frictionless business model, and as APIs are the most frictionless approach to deliver your service to developers -- providing an API to your cloud service is critical.

What's your take on this? As a developer? As a vendor? Let me know in the comments.

Footnotes:

Footnote 1 - At the meetup I mentioned that I borrowed the phrase "darken the sky with professional services" from former Sun Microsystems CEO Scot Mcneally, who used to say this about IBM. That phrase always reminds me of the screaming flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz so I showed the picture below.

Footnote 2 - As I mentioned at the meetup, a few months ago I exchanged some emails about this with my friend Weblogic co-founder Bob Pasker. As a homage to the Weblogic guys I showed a screenshot of their web site circa 1996, which I picked up from Archive.org:

 As a footnote to the footnote, someone on Twitter got excited by the use of Papyrus font!

Footnote 3 - At the meetup I had a slide titled "The Tale of PTB". PTB, or Ponytail Boy, is JBoss founder Marc Fleury's nickname for former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz (the only Fortune 500 CEO in history with a ponytail). I talked about this blog post from Schwartz that describes the "enterprise creep-up" phenomenon nicely:

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it."

Not exactly a buying signal.

I was stunned. I asked, "why?" He responded, "Oracle is our global standard, and with 20,000 developers, people need to follow the rules." I said we had a very good relationship with Oracle, and started talking about how fast Oracle runs against our new Open Storage products. Until he interrupted me, "...but my ban failed." What? "We hire lots of people out of college every year, and they all come in knowing MySQL. All my prototypes are written to MySQL, and now I have a big base of MySQL apps I don't want to port, and a bunch of MySQL programmers I don't want to retrain. So I'd like a commercial relationship."

In a nutshell, that's adoption in action. Change in IT isn't just a top down phenomenon - it's more often bottom up*.

Open APIs Panel at OSBC

I was kindly invited by Matt Asay to moderate a panel at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) on March 18 at San Francisco. Below are the details of the panel.

I did not write the description below (it was already there when I got on board), but I think it makes some interesting points. That said, I'd love to get any comments, suggestions, ideas on what you think the panel should be talking about. What's your take on the topic and what do you think are the interesting drivers and barriers for open API adoption -- and how do open APIs affect cloud computing and business in general.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Open Cloud – Open APIs and Economic Growth 

Moderator: Geva Perry

Panelists:

Scott Metzger, CTO, TransUnion
Dion Hinchcliffe, CTO, Hinchcliffe & Company
Peter Coffee, Director Platform Research, Salesforce.com
Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera
Sam Ramji, VP Strategy, Sonoa

Openness has been used as an index of economic growth in international markets. With the rapid expansion of cloud computing, we have seen a wave of business expansion based on open APIs which has enabled innovation by 3rd parties, much as open source has enabled this trend in software. Openness is unevenly distributed however, and in some areas open APIs do not promise open data, which threatens the expansion of the cloud economy. What are the key concerns for technologists in the openness of cloud computing? How can we collectively drive the standards of the industry towards an open cloud? Come to this session to learn about the state of the art and challenge the panelists on the value and requirements of openness in the cloud.

Migration to the Cloud: CloudConnect Panel

The excellent CloudConnect conference is coming up in Santa Clara, California, March 15-18. There is a lot of excitement around this event, as the content seems excellent and many people are coming into the Bay Area for this event.

As a matter of fact, the San Francisco Cloud Computing Club is also having a meetup around the event on Tuesday, March 16 at 6:30 pm with many "clouderati" expected to participate. Should be fun.

Back to CloudConnect, on March 16 at 1:30 PM, I'll be participating in a panel moderated by Randy Bias (@randybias), which is part of the Cloud Computing Migration track at the conference. Below are the official details and Randy provides additional background on the CloudScaling blog.

Moving to Clouds: It's Not All or Nothing  - Panel

You're ready to embrace cloud computing. You can move your IT to on-demand public clouds, and reap the benefits of elasticity; or you can create on-premise clouds that make you more agile and efficient while keeping control of data. The only thing you can't afford to do is keep using old-fashioned IT. But when it's time to adopt a cloud strategy, the options can be daunting. Do you need a public cloud? Private? Both? Should you use a platform or an infrastructure cloud? Which applications are candidates for cloud deployment?

In this opening session, you'll learn the differences between public and private clouds, and the factors you need to consider when planning a migration to cloud-based IT.

Moderator Randy Bias, Founder, Cloudscaling

Speaker Ellen Rubin, VP of Products, CloudSwitch

Speaker Geva Perry, Author, Thinking Out Cloud

Speaker Victoria Livschitz, CEO, GridDynamics

Speaker Tom Gregory, CTO, Presidio Health

Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud

I'm happy to say that this year I'll be working with the organizers of the excellent Under The Radar (UTR) conference as a Content Advisor and on the start-up selection committee. The conference takes place on April 16, 2010 at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA.

If you haven't had a chance to attend past events, it is a unique and kind of fun format where startups get to present to a panel of judges (typically VCs, Fortune 500 execs, analysts, etc.) and receive a critique on the spot.

It's a great place for companies to get exposed to and network with venture capitalists, journalists, potential customers and partners. A lot of great startups presented at UTR and went on to do great things, including Zimbra, 3Tera, Elastra, Heroku, Flickr, LinkedIN, Twilio, Sauce Labs and many others.

If you'd like your company to present you can apply here or just leave me a comment or contact me via Twitter.