Re: Learning

Ahead in the Clouds
February 18–19, 2009
San Diego, CA

field trip
Calit2
February 20

David Reed previews the conference
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conference overview
What are the forces driving the development of cloud computing? Are we striving to create an
industrial-strength IT infrastructure available 24/7 for enterprises and nomads alike? A flexible platform that supports emerging market opportunities? A test bed for new projects?

Yes, yes, and yes. The cloud is an intangible, rapidly evolving concept that builds on a decentralized, readily available, and highly competitive informationsharing system. The “cloud model” appears to be far more pliable, competitive, and versatile than the old time-sharing or client-server models. Users envision less lock-in and more innovation. Information providers see opportunities for more synergies, faster launches, and lower barriers to entry. What’s real, what’s fantasy—and what’s the timeline?

Scrutiny will be essential to coordinate processing, locate information, avoid data redundancy, and
enable resource management. We expect easy scale-up, but what will our measure of scale be?
We’ll demand responsiveness, yet we’ll have to deal with latency issues. Will service-centric computing
become a truly dominant business model?

The cloud multiplies the number of third parties we must trust and makes their locations, goals,
and roles less visible. Concepts about jurisdiction, local laws, residency, storage, and use of personal
and other information will require rethinking. In some nations, politics could affect access unless
network neutrality issues are resolved.

How will we handle outages in the cloud and lack of access to the network? Could next-generation
data centers help? Will we be able to balance our newfound dependence on the cloud with our
reliance on locally available services? The distinction between devices, desktops, and the Web may well
disappear, so what new affordances and usage models will define the user experience? In the
end, will we see the cloud as an IT utility, another mode of outsourcing, or a viable, organizational
computing platform?

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Partial list of speakers

Dr. Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems
Mr. George Crump, President, Storage Switzerland
Mr. Doug Cutting, Hadoop Project Founder, Yahoo!
Mr. Russ Daniels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Services Strategy,
Hewlett-Packard
Mr. Steve Fisher, Senior Vice President, Platform Division, salesforce.com
Mr. Michael Groner, Chief Architect, Appistry
Dr. Bill McColl, Founder, Cloudscale
Dr. Paul Miller, Analyst, Cloudofdata.com
Mr. Eric Olden, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Symplified
Dr. Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer, Sun Microsystems
Mr. Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate Vice President, Windows Azure, Microsoft
Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Vertica Systems
Mr. Erik Troan, Chief Technology Officer, rPath
Dr. Rich Wolski, Director, EUCALYPTUS Project

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