Build a Cloud Day Interview with Sebastian Stadil of Scalr

Build a Cloud Day Interview with Sebastian Stadil of Scalr:
As we get ready for a trio of Build a Cloud Days, I thought it’d be helpful to post some pre-event interviews with some of the speakers who are going to be appearing at one or more of the events. First up, Sebastian Stadil of Scalr.
Sebastian will be speaking on September 26th at the Build a Cloud Day (BACD) ahead of PuppetConf, and on October 1st ahead of the Build a Cloud Day before CloudCon Expo. Seats are still available for each event, but sign up early!
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your background, and your current job?
Sebastian Stadil: I’m the founder of Scalr, which is open source cloud management software. While Scalr started off as a project alone, it has since grown into a 20-person, profitable startup, of which I am now the CEO.
Q: What will you be speaking about at Build a Cloud Day?
Sebastian Stadil: I will be giving a demo of Scalr, and show what can be done on CloudStack with it (we now have support, whereas in Chicago it wasn’t complete).
Q: What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to companies starting to adopt IaaS and/or PaaS solutions?
Sebastian Stadil: To choose CloudStack over competitors. It’s the most reliable IaaS project, closest to feature parity with EC2 and S3, and well supported by the existing AWS ecosystem. A big plus too is the API which was very well designed.
Q: A big topic in cloud computing right now is the “open” cloud. Opinions differ, though, on what “open” is. What do you think an “open” cloud looks like, and how important is it that a company or organizatino has an “open” cloud?
Sebastian Stadil: There are varying degrees of openness, indeed. Software can be under an open license, but not under open development. An example of this was the early days of Cassandra: it was code thrown over the wall by Facebook with no collaborative design effort. Then there’s open development, like most Apache top-level projects. Choosing an open cloud allows you to influence the project in a direction you want, with the code that you contribute.
Q: What’s the biggest opportunity you see around IaaS and PaaS technologies for companies that are adopting these technologies?
Sebastian Stadil: At the end of the day, we are all about making supporting technologies that allow science, engineering, and entertainment to be more productive. Areas of inefficiencies will continue to be rooted out, and one such area is revising internal processes. By making things self-service, I see such an opportunity.
Q: What’s the biggest challenge you see around these technologies?
Sebastian Stadil: Adapting open source technologies to use the cloud is a huge pain point. Software like WordPress doesn’t work well in the cloud, so that limits your choice of technology.