My Top Five Sessions at the CloudOpen Conference

CloudOpen will make its debut in a little over a month in beautiful San Diego alongside LinuxCon. While it will still be the best deal in technology conferences, the registration price goes up on Sunday. (Why do I think it’s a good deal? Two amazing conferences for the price of one, three amazing free as in beer parties, skateboarding lessons, hacker lounges and so on). This event will sell out so if you want to join us, please register today.

Here are my top five sessions at CloudOpen:

• Cloud API’s – The New Agent of Vendor Lock-In – Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus; Cole Crawford, Nebula; Sam Ramji, Apigee, Reuven Cohen, Virtustream. Like system calls, Cloud API’s are the bridge to the back end infrastructure that interface with the complex hardware below. Join a panel discussion with Marten Mickos, Cole Crawford, Reuven Cohen & Sam Ramji for a discussion on the current landscape of the technology people are calling the new anti vendor lock.
• User-Driven Innovation in the Open Cloud – Greg DeKoenigsberg, Eucalyptus Systems. The open cloud is still in its early stages of evolution — but its users are ready to innovate now.  In this talk, we will discuss user-driven innovation and its role in the development of open source software in general, and in open source cloud software in particular, with examples of how users are hacking open source cloud software to drive their own innovation strategies.
• Beyond Open Source in the Cloud – Gordon Haff, Red Hat. Openness doesn’t stop and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with the announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. It doesn’t stop and end with open source either. An open cloud isn’t about having some singular feature. It’s about maximizing a wide range of characteristics that push the needle from closed to truly open. These include open source and open standards for sure. But they also include portability of applications and data, viable and independent communities, freedom from IP encumbrances, and APIs that are independent of specific implementations.
• OpenStack – Beyond the Software – Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack. “Open cloud is more than software. Open environments and ecosystems create incredible opportunities for users and businesses to push technology forward. 
  OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. Designed to be pluggable and extensible, OpenStack allows you to choose from a variety of commodity or enterprise hardware, tools and management options depending on your use case. 
• The DevOps Way of Delivering Results in the Enterprise – James Wickett, Mentor Graphics Corporation. Delivering Software as a Service in the cloud requires agility and speed.  Sadly, those are two attributes that big companies aren’t usually good at doing.  Instead of organizing to deliver results, companies tend to build silos where development, operations, QA and security operate as separate entities.  DevOps unites these groups to deliver services faster and provide results that matter. This talk will arm you with the DevOps patterns to follow as well as point out specific anti-patterns to avoid.  To show you how to implement DevOps in your org, this talk will cover sample architectures and Open Source tooling.  Come hear how to start delivering results with increased agility and speed.

It’s hard to pick only five with great sessions on the schedule covering CloudStack, Chef, Ceph, Gluster, KVM, Xen, Ganeti and more. Many companies are researching and/or implementing cloud solutions right now. I hope CloudOpen will give you the data you need to pick the right open cloud technologies for your business. I hope to see you in San Diego!

Register before Sunday to take advantage of the lower pricing.