Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cloud

Imagine it’s eight o’clock on a Thursday morning and you awake to see a bulldozer out your window ready to plow over your data center. Normally you may wish to consult the Encyclopedia Galáctica to discern the best course of action but your copy is likely out of date. And while the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a wholly remarkable book it doesn’t cover the nuances of cloud computing. That’s why you need the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cloud Computing (HHGTCC) or at least to attend this talk understand the state of open source cloud computing. Specifically this talk will cover infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and developments in big data and how to more effectively take advantage of these technologies using open source software. Technologies that will be covered in this talk include Apache CloudStack, Chef, CloudFoundry, NoSQL, OpenStack, Puppet and many more.

Specific topics for discussion will include:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service - The Systems Cloud  - Get a comparision of the open source cloud platforms including OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula
• Platform-as-a-Service  - The Developers Cloud - Find out what tools are availble to build portable auto-scaling applications including CloudFoundry, OpenShift, Stackato and more. 
• Data-as-a-Service - The Analytics Cloud - Want to figure out the who, what , where , when and why of big data ? You get an overview of open source NoSQL databases and technologies like MapReduce to help crunch massive data sets in the cloud. 

Finally you'll get a overview of the tools that can help you really take advantage of the cloud? Want to auto-scale virtual machiens to serve millions of web pages or want to automate the configuration of cloud computing environments. You'll learn how to combine these tools to provide continous deployment systems that will help you earn DevOps cred in any data center. 

[Finally, for those of you that are Douglas Adams fans please accept the deepest apologies for bad analogies to the HHGTTG.]