Speaker Interview: Jorge Castro

Jorge Castro will be giving a SCALE 13x talk on "Easy Big Data workloads in the Cloud with Juju" on SCALE 13x Saturday at 1:30. The SCALE Team caught up with Jorge to talk a little about his presentation.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I'm Jorge Castro and I work on Juju and Ubuntu at the Cloud Develpment and Operations part of Canonical. I come from a sysadmin background (but not a cloud one) and generally speaking I try to help people solve their problems with doing things in the cloud.

I've been using Linux in one way or another since 1998.

Q: You're giving a talk entitled "Easy Big Data workloads in the Cloud with Juju." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: There is a huge pile of tools out there that available; these days it can take you a disproportionate time just to configure and try out things that in the end you might not even use. So what we're working on is enabling users to just fire off predetermined sets of big data tools right out of the box. That gets you 80% of the way there right away, and then you can spend the last 20% turning the knobs to get exactly what you want.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: Hah, no way, I've been coming for the last four years or so. It's my favorite show because of so many grass roots projects that present and participate. You're not getting a marketing drone rambling at a talk, you get to listen to the person who is really passionate about the technology and community. Even if you just sit at the bar at night you're going to learn something.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: Yes! This year will be special, I'm really looking forward to the live Bad Voltage show, it's already shaping up to be an epic year.

[SCALE Team interview by Dennis Rex]