Performance and Availability Track
Performance matters. And in the cloud, performance matters more than ever—layers of complexity and third-party, shared environments separate users from applications. Services are elastic, which means you can have any SLA you want, as long as you're willing to design it yourself. And you can have a fast application, too—if you're willing to deal with the bill at the end of the month.
So how should you think about cloud performance? In this track's sessions on the performance of cloud computing, three cloud computing and Internet performance experts—Steve Riley (Riverbed, Amazon), Hooman Beheshti (Strangeloop, Radware) and Alistair Croll (Coradiant, CloudOps)—take you on a tour of the challenges on-demand computing poses to reliable, fast user experiences.
In this track, you'll learn:
- The new models of delay, capacity, and uptime that on-demand computing requires
- What and how to measure when it comes to performance, and how to think about metrics
- Where delay happens across the cloud environment
- How shared computing and back-end contention affect user experience
- What the WAN and the Application Delivery Network mean in a cloudy compute model
- How to spread load and optimize application front-ends to speed up applications
Who should attend:
- Hands-on IT professionals
- Web operators responsible for performance and uptime
- Network and application managers
- Service providers tasked with delivering and measuring service quality
- Architects trying to design big, fast, reliable, Internet-scale systems
Track Chair
Alistair Croll
Founder, Bitcurrent
Alistair Croll is the principal analyst at Bitcurrent, a research firm focused on emerging technologies; a founding partner of startup accelerator Year One Labs; an executive at CloudOps; and an advisor to various technology venture firms. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded startup accelerator Rednod; web performance management firm Coradiant, and Networkshop, a research firm. He has also worked as a product manager for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.
Alistair coordinates content for a variety of prominent technology events such as Cloud Connect, Interop, and Strata. He is also the creator of the Bitnorth conference and helped found the International Startup Festival in Montreal, Canada, and has written several books on technology, including Web Operations (2010, O'Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O'Reilly) and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall).
A sought-after speaker with 15 years' on-stage experience, he regularly addresses business audiences and IT executives on a wide range of topics, including cloud computing, product management, data-driven marketing, Big Data, startup acceleration, web analytics, and more. He blogs at Solve For Interesting.
