Introducing CloudOpen: Why Now and Why The Linux Foundation?

I am pleased to announce CloudOpen, our new conference celebrating and exploring the open source projects, technologies and companies who make up the cloud. CloudOpen will bring together the open source projects, products and companies that are driving the cloud and big data ecosystems today and present best practices from the world of traditional open source.

You may be asking yourself, “Why another cloud event?” There are certainly no shortage of them, which isn’t surprising given the nascent stage of an important new market segment. But  there was nothing that I felt focused on the open source technologies and the open source way behind the cloud.

This event began when developers from various cloud-related projects came to me and said, “We should probably be talking to each other.” The Linux Foundation’s role in the industry is to facilitate collaboration amongst developers, projects, companies and users. The cloud and the open source technologies that comprise it are now reaching the point of maturity that this collaboration can truly benefit users. Cloud infrastructure choice is also reaching the point of proliferation that users need to have a place to educate themselves on “open” as it relates to the cloud. And this isn’t just at a source level: the conversation must include data policies, APIs and so on. The Linux Foundation can provide the neutral forum and the platform for this conversation on open to take place. 

I feel truly blessed to have assembled many leaders of cloud computing for the program committee:

• Greg DeKoenigsberg, vice president of community, Eucalyptus Systems
• Mark Hinkle, director of cloud computing community, Citrix
• Gerrit Huzienga, cloud architect, IBM
• Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services, The Linux Foundation
• Stefano Maffulli, community manager, OpenStack
• Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist, Dell
• John Mark Walker, director of communities, Red Hat

These indivuals represent the right technologies and also have the right background in open source to create a truly useful event. Expect content on cloud platforms, virtualization projects, storage, devops best practices and more. There will also be collaborative meetings between open cloud projects. 

I want to thank the platinum sponsors of CloudOpen who are supporting this work: Canonical, HP, IBM, Intel. The Linux Foundation is a non-profit who needs the support of companies to make collaboration possible. And in an event landscape where prices continue to climb, we try to make our events affordable for a broad group of people. These sponsors help us to do that. 

The CFP deadline is June 1 so please submit a talk if you would like to participate. Early bird registration ends on April 29th so please register. This year one registration gets you into both LinuxCon and CloudOpen. San Diego is truly shaping up to be an unforgettable gathering of the leaders behind open source. LinuxCon, CloudOpen, the Xen Summit, the Linux Kernel Summit, The Linux Plumbers Conference and more will all be there during the week. We hope you’ll join us.