Mastering The Cloud

I sat down this evening and looked at the schedule of sessions at the Cloud Expo next week. I’m looking forward to it all as well as meeting up with some colleagues in Thomson Reuters at the Times Square office.

3/30 - Monday

• Ahead in the Cloud: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service - Dr Werner Vogels
• Smarter Business Solutions Through Dynamic Infrastructure - Jim Rymarczyk
• Leveraging the Clouds for Reliable Web Apps - Thorsten von Eicken
• Enhanced Security Models for Machine Image Deployments - Glenn Brunette
• The Cloud, the Rich Client & the Buckeye State
• Leveraging Endpoint Virtualization - Ken Berryman

3/31 - Tuesday

• Cloud Computing and the Enterprise - Dr Kristof Kloeckner
• Smarter Insights: How the CIO Becomes a Hero Again - Michael Hill
• Optimizing Web Application Performance in a Virtualized Environment - Dan Juengst
• Maximizing the Business Value of Virtualization in Enterprise and Cloud Computing Environments - Stephen Elliot
• Sun’s Incubation Platform: Helping Startups Serve the Enterprise
• Why VDI? - Martin Ingram
• Implementing Cloud Storage: Public or Private? - Sajai Krishnan
• Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Enterprise Architecture - Stuart Charlton
• Building a 100 Terabyte Internal Storage Cloud from Unused Diskspace - Jason Stowe
• The Live Cloud - Bill McColl
• Cloud Computing & Enterprise IT: Cost & Operational Benefits

4/01 - Wednesday

• A World of Many Clouds - David Douglas
• Unified Cloud Computing - Reuven Cohen
• Messaging in the Cloud - Email, SMS and Voice - Bryan Wade
• Assembling and Using Cloud Services with Service Component Architecture - Doug Tidwell
• Open Source & Cloud Computing: Is There a Free Software Alternative? - Pau Garcia-Mila

I’ll be attending the Cloud Computing Expo in NYC at the end of the month. I’ll be there all three days thanks to a complimentary VIP Gold Pass from ParaScale. I’m looking forward to hearing great presentations, meeting lots of people, and partaking in engaging discussions.

If you are in NYC for this event, send me an email.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long been the forerunner of the cloud computing industry. The people who research, follow, and use AWS are usually an enthusiastic group and love to talk about it and how it can be applied to applications and architectures. There are various AWS User Groups out there and I was lucky enough to find out there was one in my area (Rochester, NY).

Earlier this week I attended a Rochester Amazon Web Services User Group (RAWSUG) event hosted at RIT. Although the majority of what was covered was an overview presentation of AWS for those not familiar with it, it was great to see a room full of local AWS enthusiasts.

The presenters were Mitch Garnaat from Cloud Right and David Kavanagh from Direct Thought. They did a great job presenting and I enjoyed asking them questions and meeting them afterwards. Chris Moyer, from Cloud Right, also joined to support questions. Here are some of the items I noted that stood out from the session:

• Ability to mount read only version of an EBS filesystem to more than one machine has been talked about Amazon and will potentially be on the radar for release in the future.
• David has been working on a slick iPhone interface for AWS and gave a demo. I liked it, however wished effort would have been put towards a mobile web version instead so that it can benefit all mobile platforms.
• Confirmation that Amazon will be providing a hardware load balancing solution; availability date was TBD

I enjoyed the event greatly and look forward to the next one and potentially working with David, Mitch, and Chris in the future. If you are looking to master the cloud, finding a group of other cloud enthusiastis that you can meet with and share news/ideas is a great approach. I highly recommend checking out the AWS User Group page and see and attend an event near you.