Cloud Performance Summit – Updated Info

Monday, March 7, 1:15 – 4:30

The Cloud Performance Summit at Cloud Connect 2011 in Santa Clara, CA featured an impressive array of vendors and end users discussing important issues around performance in on-demand environments.

Sessions:

Introduction: The Challenge of Cloud Performance

In this opening session, we’ll look at what changes in a cloud. For decades, the three variables of IT — cost, service quality, and load — have been locked in a tight equation. But as utility computing promises virtually limitless capacity, the equation changes. We also face many more places where things can go wrong, and a confusing, opaque supply chain of computing services. To kick off the summit, we’ll frame some of these concerns and set an agenda for the event, posing questions of both vendors and end users that we hope to answer.

Speaker – Alistair Croll, Founder, BitCurrent

Architectures for High-Performance Utility Computing

In this session, Adrian Cockroft, Cloud Architect at Netflix will talk about what it takes to build, test, monitor and scale massive on-demand applications. Using his experience at Netflix and elsewhere, he’ll look at the challenges of massive elasticity.

Speaker – Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect, Netflix

Testing and Breaking Clouds

Once applications are ready, they need to be tested. We’ll tackle the challenges of testing clouds — and the ethics and logistics of putting load on a shared system. We’ll talk about the scale needed to test truly world-serving applications, and the data management challenges that result.

Panelist – Donald Foss, Director of Global Testing Services, Keynote Systems
Panelist – Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA
Panelist - Imad Mouline, CTO, Gomez

How Ready is the Cloud? A look at real-world results

There’s been some research on cloud performance, from a variety of sources. In this session, we’ll look at the state of cloud performance measurement, review monitoring methodologies, and see where we are today.

Moderator – Alistair Croll, Founder, BitCurrent
Panelist – Marty Kagan, President and Co-Founder, Cedexis
Panelist – Jason Read, Founder, CloudHarmony

The State of Cloud SLAs

Cloud applications should be built for failure. At least, that’s what cloud architects suggest: don’t expect things to work, build your applications using sharding and resilient architectures, and you’ll have high availability without an SLA. At the same time, enterprises want a commitment from cloud providers that has real teeth. How do we break this logjam? In this panel, a variety of cloud providers will discuss the terms and conditions with which they’re comfortable, and explain why the best SLA may be one you write yourself.

Moderator – Nolan Goldberg, Attorney, Proskauer LLP
Panelist – Alex Polvi, Director of Product, Rackspace
Panelist – John Keagy, CEO, GoGrid
Panelist – Sundar Raghavan, CMO, Skytap
Panelist – Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO, Riverbed

Break

Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away

Cloud computing doesn’t go all the way down to the concrete. As you add utility services to your application, you lose the ability to collect a complete picture of performance. That means agents, scripts, and virtual appliances have to gather and aggregate data. In this panel, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of application instrumentation approaches, and what has to change to properly understand the health of the application.

Moderator – Shlomo Swidler, Founder, Orchestratus
Panelist – Jyoti Bansal, Founder & CEO, AppDynamics
Panelist – Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management and Corporate Development, Keynote Systems
Panelist – Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management, Webmetrics, Neustar
Panelist – David Link, President and Chief Executive Officer of ScienceLogic, Inc.
Panelist – William Louth, CTO, JINSPIRED BV
Panelist – Russell Rothstein, Vice President, Product Marketing, Optier

Putting it all Together: When Big Metrics Mean Big Data

Aggregating a huge amount of performance information — particularly when it comes from many sources in a short period of time — is a huge technical challenge. In this session, we’ll discuss new data models, algorithms, and parallel computing techniques that can help digest and analyze performance information in real time.

Panelist – Marty Kagan, President and Co-Founder, Cedexis
Panelist – Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management, Webmetrics, Neustar
Panelist – Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA

Tools and Techniques for Performance Optimization

So you know you’re slow. What can you do about it? From optimization appliances to overlay networks, developers have a wide array of choices that can fix some of their problems. Other challenges demand better algorithms — or higher monthly bills. In this session, we’ll look at the technologies that can improve performance, increase capacity, and make systems more resilient.

Moderator – Randy Bias, CEO, Cloudscaling
Panelist – Geoff Kreiling, Manager – Product Development, Masergy Communications Inc.
Panelist – Todd Paoletti, Product Line Director, Akamai
Panelist – Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO, Riverbed
Panelist – Steve Shah, Sr. Director of Product Management, NetScaler and Cloud Product Group, Citrix

What Users Want – What Vendors Have

Now that we’ve looked at the cloud performance problem from all angles, it’s time to decide what we need to do. How far apart are users and vendors? What commitments and regulations need to be in place? How trustworthy and reliable are on-demand offerings? In this closing discussion, we’ll try to decide what’s ready, what’s unnecessary, and what’s missing.

Moderator – George Reese, CTO, enStratus
Panelist – John Keagy, CEO, GoGrid
Panelist – Alex Polvi, Director of Product, Rackspace
Panelist – Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect, Netflix
Panelist – Sundar Raghavan, CMO, Skytap
Panelist – Alexei Rodriguez, Senior Director of Operations and IT, Proofpoint
Panelist – John deVadoss, Managing Director, The Ananya Group

Conclusions and Next Steps