I wanted to follow up from yesterday’s post on the upcoming Cloud Connect event.  In particular, I want to talk a bit about the track I’m leading: Cloud Migrations.  The focus of the track is to talk about:

  • How to adopt cloud now

  • Choosing between clouds: internal, external, or both?

  • Real world example use cases

  • Understanding how clouds are built when creating a strategy

There are some great panelists who are attending and I thought I would run through them here to give you a flavor of for our track.

Folks Who Really Did It All of the folks on our first panel, “Moving to clouds: it’s not all or nothing”, have experience with migrating to clouds, but two of them, Victoria Livschitz and Tom Gregory have some really interesting experiences.  Victoria’s company, GridDynamics, was responsible for the famous Macys.com use case highlighted on GoGrid’s website.  Tom Gregory, CTO of PresidioHealth has some great insights to share with his recent migration from his own co-location space to a cloud computing provider.

Also on our first panel is the illustrious Geva Perry, author of Thinking Out Cloud, one of the earliest and more insightful cloud blogs.  Geva was also previously CMO at Gigaspaces and GM for their cloud computing product.  Gigaspaces was one of the first application frameworks to provide a scalable platform that abstracts infrastructure clouds.  Now we advises with a number of startups and enterprises in various stages of migrating to clouds including Heroku, Twilio, ScaleDB, Sauce Labs, and NEC.

Last, but not least on our first panel, and bridging nicely to the following section, is Ellen Rubin, who’s company, CloudSwitch, provides a novel approach to migrating apps to the cloud.  Their technology is unique in that it picks up a currently deployed application, moves it to Amazon’s EC2 in a secure fashion, and then makes it appear that the application is still deployed in your datacenter.

Vendors Who Enable It Who better than RightScale’s CEO Michael Crandell to talk about enterprise businesses who migrated their web applications to the cloud?  Complementing Michael is George Reese of enStratus.  George wrote the book on Cloud Application Architectures and enStratus competes with RightScale, but has a particular focus on enterprise businesses.  He’s got a great use case he’s planning on sharing that I think will highlight the value of cloud for big businesses.

Hearing from these two cloud enablement businesses, one an ‘old’ stalwart with deep experience like RightScale and another an up and comer like enStratus will help us see a broader spectrum of success in cloud adoption.

People Who Built It How can you pick to embrace external clouds, build an internal cloud, or mix the models if you don’t know what it’s all about?  We’ve got a tremendous lineup of folks who have actually built external/internal, private/public clouds, or the tools for them.

Ken Owens of Savvis was key to architecting their Spirit offering.  I’ve spent time with Ken before and he’s the real deal.

Philip Morris, the CTO of HPC for Platform Computing is another long time builder of large scale infrastructure and an expert, in particular, on HPC and grid computing.

Martin Casado, CTO of Nicira was one of the authors of the OpenFlow protocol.  He and Nicira are set to revolutionize the world of networking with true network virtualization.  Martin is a dynamic individual with deep insights on how the network is going to change in cloud computing environments of the future.

Cloud Migrations Build vs. buy?  Embrace and extend?  Get real value today?  We’re going to answer all of these questions during the Cloud Migrations track.  I hope to see you there!

–Randy Bias

UPDATE: Added information on all of the track panelists.