Friday, June 28, 2013 8:42 AMCloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 Wrap-upThe blog of Kirk Jantzer
This conference can be wrapped up in one word: AWESOME!
When I booked my ticket for this conference, I knew there was a possibility it was going to be different than other conferences in the sense it was, as the title reads, a collaboration conference specifically focused on CloudStack. Most other conferences are abstract to a degree: they are focused on a facet of the IT industry (security, networking, servers, storage, etc). They're typically several 4-5 days in length with several tracks and several hundreds, if not thousands, of attendees. This conference on the other hand, was only two days (preceded by a hack day - an opportunity for developers from all over the world to be in the same room to work on things). There were three tracks on the first day, and two tracks on the second. The attendee count for CCC13 topped out at ~400. Needless to say, it was a very close-knit conference. If you had a question during one of the sessions, there was a good chance you were going to be able to ask it.
The fun started with a two day training CloudStack training (provided byShapeBlue) that preceded the conference. There was less than a dozen people in the training, so it was very easy to stay focused and ask lots of pertinent questions. To give you an idea of what was crammed into the two days, here is the agenda we had:
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There's talk of extending the training to span more days so that there can be more focus on some of the subjects that required more attention (networking being one of them). If you're interested in CloudStack, and don't know where to start, I HIGHLY suggest you start with ShapeBlue. They offer training, setup assistance, and more. Also, they are an awesome and very smart group of guys, and they know their sh**. They don't just teach what they've learned. They're in the community - they have staff that contribute to the CloudStack project. They give back by sponsoring things like this conference - and they didn't just sign a donation check, most of the staff, including the CEO, were in the training, as well as conference sessions.
If you've read my previous blog posts, I've talked about CloudStack and my learnings so far. I would in no way consider myself an expert, so it was nice to attend a conference that could really help hammer home some things I was hung up on. Also, it was an awesome opportunity to finally be able to put a face to a name as well as meet new people, like: Chip Childers, David Nalley, Giles Sirett, Geoff Higginbottom, Steve Roles, Ian Rae, John Burwell, Tariq Iqbal, Aaron Delp, Adrian Cockcroft, Kelcey Damage,Dean Bruhn, and several more.
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| The ShapeBlue crew (L to R): Steve, Geoff, Giles, Paul, Tariq |
I won't go into the conference sessions in to too much detail, but for a collaboration conference, I was just slightly disappointed in regards to the sessions I chose to attend. There were a few of the sessions that were disguised by vendors as technical sessions that turned out to be sales pitches by non-technical people about products that had little to nothing to do with CloudStack. For the upcoming conference (in Amsterdam in November), there is talk of giving vendors a sales-focused track. There is nothing wrong with sales-focused sessions - there are people that want to attend them. But when they are disguised as technical discussions, it is a waste the time of the people that were planning out which sessions they wanted to attend and which they'll have to give up. I walked out of at least three or four sessions less than half way through the presentations; in turn missing other sessions I could have benefited from.
I will say that the best "sessions" to me were the keynotes. The opening keynote by Chip Childers on the state of CloudStack; how it has gotten to where it is, and where it's going. He was followed by Gene Kim (co-author ofThe Phoenix Project) with a talk around DevOps and how it is changing the industry. To top it off, the first 300 attendees to the conference received a free hardcopy of his book, and he stuck around after his talk to sign them and meet people. Real cool guy if you ask me :-)
The end of the first day was icing on the cake. The organizers of CCC13 booked us over at the Great America Park. There was a dinner provided, but the best part was the park was closed to the public from 8:30pm to 10pm, and we had 5 rides that we could choose from. Talk about awesome. The best part was bumper cars. For about 30 minutes, a group of us just stayed in the bumper cars, crashing into each other (the operator would just reset us when the time ran out). I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
Before the second day sessions even started, I got to do something I've never done before - be on a podcast. Aaron Delp was pointed to me after speaking with a few of the key CloudStack guys (Chip and David). This guy doesn't joke around, look at that mic he packed with him!
Before the second day sessions even started, I got to do something I've never done before - be on a podcast. Aaron Delp was pointed to me after speaking with a few of the key CloudStack guys (Chip and David). This guy doesn't joke around, look at that mic he packed with him!
Day two was kicked off by Dean Cunning with a keynote about the Apache Software Foundation, explaining how it differs from other single-product focused communities, as well as how the foundation operates and what its expectations are.
After all of the second day sessions were done, the conference was closed out by Adrian Cockcroft, who spoke about how he gets out of the way of developer innovation by providing an infrastructure that can be deployed in minutes by developers. While he had several wonderful quotes, my favorite was when he equated "legacy" datacenters to sausage factories, saying something along the lines of "I love sausage, but I don't care to know what goes into getting it to me." When I approached him afterwards, I introduced myself as the foreman at a sausage factory. :-)
One of the slides he had that really stood out was a ist of suggested books he has been inspired by.
After all of the second day sessions were done, the conference was closed out by Adrian Cockcroft, who spoke about how he gets out of the way of developer innovation by providing an infrastructure that can be deployed in minutes by developers. While he had several wonderful quotes, my favorite was when he equated "legacy" datacenters to sausage factories, saying something along the lines of "I love sausage, but I don't care to know what goes into getting it to me." When I approached him afterwards, I introduced myself as the foreman at a sausage factory. :-)
One of the slides he had that really stood out was a ist of suggested books he has been inspired by.
Here is a link to each book on Amazon:
And with that, my wrap-up is complete. A sincere thank you to everyone whom I had the pleasure of meeting during the conference, as well as those that organized and put on the conference. Thanks for reading, and as always, questions/comments/critiques welcome.
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