2013 Speaker List

Is cloud computing fulfilling its promise? We were all told it was about matching capacity with demand often depicted by an elegantly smooth curves contrasted against stepwise capex spending of the on premise data center era. It was awesome, if only it were true.

Many providers offer their best prices bound to long contracts, which looks an awful lot like that stepwise capex spending we were all trying to avoid. Some force customers to choose among cookie-cutter sized virtual machines with complicated names that often see CPU or RAM go unutilized simply due to lack of choice. Throw in the fact that hourly billing remains the dominant paradigm despite the ability to shift to more granular per minute billing and it's obvious that things aren't as cloudy as we all thought.

Is cloud computing fulfilling its promise of matching capacity demand? We were told cloud computing was all about new technology and unlocking the ability to run today's and tomorrow’s use cases, however, now the biggest cloud computing provider wants to sell into the enterprise. The model of cloud computing we were promised has not come to fruition—have we been duped?

Many providers offer pre-packaged cloud instance sizes and tie their best offers to three year agreements, however, this looks an awful lot like that stepwise capital expenditure spending we were all trying to avoid. Do you ever wonder how much cloud infrastructure in these cookie-cutter sized virtual machines have CPU or RAM resources go un-utilized? Or ask yourself why hourly billing remains the dominant paradigm despite the ability to shift to more granular per minute billing? Add in the fact that "commodity or custom low-end hardware" has slowed Moore's law and is holding performance hostage to drive mass adoption of Cloud Computing 1.0 architectures and we have to wonder—are we actually heading towards true Cloud IaaS? This session will explore these issues and asks out loud, "Is there a better way?"