The Impact of the Cloud by Chris Pinkham

During this talk, Chris Pinkham (former VP of IT Infrastructure for Amazon and current CEO of Silicon Valley startup Nimbula) shared his thoughts on the evolution of cloud computing and how its growth is changing the way we think about technology, infrastructure, and business. Chris is one of the world’s leading experts on Cloud Computing and is largely credited with bringing Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to life during his tenure at Amazon. Many experts consider EC2 as the largest public cloud on the planet. It runs on an estimated 450,000 servers and hosts notable customers such as Reddit, Quora, Netflix, foursquare, and iSeatz. Last year, EC2 was believed to be responsible for generating an estimated +$1.2 Billion in revenue for Amazon.

Chris Pinkham from Orbitz IDEAS on Vimeo.

Chris Pinkham was born in Singapore, raised and educated in Britain and South Africa. Chris has co-authored a couple of patent applications: “Managing Communications Between Computing Nodes”, “Managing Execution of Programs by Multiple Computing Systems” Chris created and ran the first commercial ISP in South Africa, Internet Africa, which he sold to UUNET in 1996. The company, now owned by MTN, remains one of the largest ISPs on the African continent. Later, Chris joined Amazon.com as Vice President, IT Infrastructure where he was responsible for the company’s global infrastructure engineering and operations. While in this role, he conceived, proposed and, together with Willem Van Biljon, built Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the highly successful public cloud service.

In 2006, Chris left Amazon Web Services and has since started a new venture with his long time friend Willem. The company, Nimbula, is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.

The Eight Hats of Data Visualization by Andy Kirk

What gets measured gets managed. Sometimes however it is difficult to measure because well, at web scale, there are just too much going on. This is where data visualization can help. In this Orbitz IDEAS talk by Andy Kirk of VisualisingData.com we are presented with some powerful techniques for thinking about data in terms of how it should be visualized. Don’t forget to watch the QA at the end. It is quite informative.

Andy Kirk presents “The 8 Hats of Data Visualization Design” from Orbitz IDEAS on Vimeo.

The nature of data visualization as a truly multi-disciplinary subject introduces many challenges. You might be a creative but how are your analytical skills? Good at closing out a design but how about the initial research and data sourcing? In this talk Andy Kirk will discuss the many different ‘hats’ a visualization designer needs to wear in order to effectively deliver against these demands. It will also contextualize these duties in the sense of a data visualization project timeline. Whether a single person will fulfill these roles, or a team collaboration will be set up to cover all bases, this presentation will help you understand the requirements of any visualization problem context.

Speaker: Andy Kirk is a freelance data visualization design consultant and trainer, and editor of the website visualisingdata.com, a popular data visualization blog. After graduating from Lancaster University with a B.Sc (hons) in Operational Research, he held a number of business analysis and information management positions at some of the largest organizations in the UK. Late 2006 provided Andy with a career-changing ‘eureka’ moment when he discovered the subject of data visualization and he has subsequently passionately pursued an expertise in the subject, completing a research Masters M.A (With Distinction) at the University of Leeds along the way. In February 2010 he launched the blog with the mission of providing readers with inspiring insights into the contemporary techniques, resources, applications and best practices in this exciting subject. His consultancy work and training courses extend this ambition, helping organizations of all shapes, sizes and domains enhance the analysis and communication of their data to maximize impact. Andy is currently working on his first book, with more to follow, and has been seen speaking at a number of important conference events, most notably as judge and presenter at Malofiej 20, the 20th anniversary of the Infographics World Summit in Pamplona, Spain.

Deployment Automation with glu

This video features Yan Pujante speaking at Chicago DevOps on the deployment automation tool he invented, subsequently opensourced, and now manages named glu. It is garnering significant interest within the DevOps mind space. The talk was quite good, got some great reviews by those that attended the meeting, and features a live demo which showcases a lot of the power glu brings to the table. Read below for more description on glu itself.

One thing we would like to mention is that this video was made possible by Carl Karsten. He is a professional that does a ton of work for the python community and other technical orgs. If you really liked the video and want to support the filming of it, and the filming of other DevOps related you may but are certainly under no obligation to donate here at the pledgie page for the video

http://blip.tv/carlfk/deployment-automation-with-glu-5356593

glu is an open source deployment automation platform. glu was originally created at LinkedIn and has been successfully used for orchestrating the deployment and management of the complex LinkedIn infrastructure for over a year. Since its open source release, glu has been gaining a lot of traction in the devops community. In this tech talk, you will learn from the author of glu, about the novel approach taken by glu to solve the deployment problem (state delta computation, ZooKeeper, REST, etc…). You will also be able to understand why glu is more than a tool but an actual platform on top of which you can customize and/or build your own deployment infrastructure. The talk will also feature a live demo of glu!

Quick update 7/11/2011 – slides available here: http://slidesha.re/nTf0Zo

Orbitz IDEAS Video: Teyo Tyree on Model Driven Management with Puppet

posted by @martinjlogan

Teyo Tyree one of the founders of Puppet Labs talks to the about model driven configuration management with Puppet. I was really impressed by Teyo and the whole puppet team to be honest and really appreciate their rigorous sysadmin culture. They seem to be very focused on the practical issues at hand and less interested in keeping up with the latest marketing buzzword of the day.

Teyo Tyree on: Model Driven Management with Puppet from Orbitz IDEAS on Vimeo.

During this video you will learn how puppet works and what drives its architecture. You will get an understanding of how the model driven approach factors into Puppet. You will also learn how to leverage this in extending Puppet configuration management and integrating it with other systems.

Jez Humble on Continuous Delivery

Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can reduce cycle times and improve the quality of their software and the reliability of the release process.

In this Orbitz IDEAS Series video Jez starts by briefly introducing the value proposition of continuous delivery. Then Jez introduces the deployment pipeline, a pattern for modeling the delivery process, ensuring everyone in delivery can self-service deployments, and providing fast feedback on the production readiness of their software upon every change to its source or configuration. He also discuss patterns for zero-downtime releases, and patterns for continuous development – keeping your software production-ready in the face of change without the use of branches in version control.

Jez Humble on Continuous Delivery – Orbitz IDEAS from Orbitz IDEAS on Vimeo.

Speaker: Jez Humble has been fascinated by computers and electronics since getting his first ZX Spectrum aged 11, and spent several years hacking on Acorn machines in 6502 and ARM assembler and BASIC until he was old enough to get a proper job. He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services and on-line retail companies. Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London and San Francisco. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MMus in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is presently living in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

John Willis on DevOps: Why Should You Care?

What do you get when you mix together sysadmins and code-monkeys? You get a weird cocktail called “DevOps” – development and operations. Pulled from the successful practices of high-scale web companies like Flickr and enterprises developing on the bleeding edge of application delivery, the promise is to make the lives of each better and, hopefully, allow their organizations to deliver better software, faster, and more frequently. dev/ops theory is still new – even shorter in its buzzword pants than “cloud”! Still, this evolving body of theory, practice, and tools looks extremely attractive.

In this video, John Willis (the co-hosts of the popular IT Management & Cloud Podcast) will catch you up on what DevOps is looking like and how it might help (or harm!) you. This video will give you a pragmatic overview of DevOps and leave with a better idea of how dev/ops applies to you and your organization.

John Willlis on DevOps: Why Should You Care? – Orbitz IDEAS from Orbitz IDEAS on Vimeo.

Speaker: John M. Willis is currently the VP of Services at Opscode, Inc. John has worked in the IT management industry for 30 years. He began his professional career at Exxon as an IT infrastructure analyst. He is the founder of four successful startups over the past 20 years Willis is known internationally for his IT Management and Cloud blog. He also has two podcast series on clouds called ‚”Cloud Cafe‚ and Droplets”. Willis is also the co-host of Redmonk’s IT Management Guys‚ podcast series.