Gluecon's Enterprise Track
The agenda is "complete." I put "complete" in quotes because as soon as we go to print on it, something will change (never fails), but for planning purposes, call it complete.
It's at this point that I like to imagine different "tracks" through the agenda. Obviously, with three-wide breakout sessions, and so many topics, the various possible tracks are many. But you can put yourself in someone's shoes and walk through things to see how they play out. This morning I'm thinking about "the enterprise track."
You're a director-level, technically-oriented enterprise IT guy or gal. Your company's already made the "we're moving to the cloud" decision, but a lot of the details around what that means are pretty sketchy. You know that moving "to the cloud" isn't the only thing you've got to worry about. Your (almost) bigger concern is how this effects the way you build and customize applications for your workforce -- especially in light of two trends: mobility and the consumerization of IT.
With all of that in mind, you decide to come in for Tuesday afternoon's workshops (May 24th) to get an in-depth, four-hour tutorial on a specific topic. You choose the one about building a standards-based private cloud because you're not totally up to speed on SNIA's recent work around the CDMI standard, and this seems like a great way to hit the ground running.
Morning 1 takes you through the keynotes -- from Chris Hoff's rapid-fire approach to cloud security to Laura Merling on data models to John Musser on the state of the API marketplace. And now you're staring a gauntlet of breakout sessions in the face.
You start with Clay Loveless on the failure of SOAP because the whole SOAP/REST thing still bothers you a bit. From there, you move to the "finishing school for API providers" because you have this sense that you're about to have a lot of APIs and no real idea what that all means in practice. Then, it's on to a session on "integration as a service" (wouldn't that make your life easier?), and into listening to a startup talk about hooking mobile applications up to the cloud (you know that's coming, and you're not looking forward to it).
That's a packed afternoon, and you're glad that you get to slide back into keynotes --one on developer ecosystems and one from Mark Suster, who seems like a really smart venture capitalist. You finish the day off by having a few cocktails and popping your head into the hackathon (which seems like it's just getting started, so you hit the sack).
Day 2 arrives and it seems like the agenda is only picking up speed. You start with Marten Mickos (who you've always wanted to hear speak, move to a great presentation on performance monitoring, and see Terry Jones give a really interesting talk on write-able storage. Then you're back into breakouts (they start earlier today).
Access Control is a huge issue, so you start with a session on REST APIs and OAuth. From there you hit a session on Hadoop and Cassandra, a case study on MongoDB, a session on building apps on top of Riak and a presentation on Graph Databases. You just primed yourself for that big data/NoSQL project that you know is coming later this year.
Your head's spinning, but it's time to pick your last two breakouts. You opt for one on managing large file transfers, and cap it all off with a talk about activity streams and cloud applications. Finally, you end with a Keynote presentation by a guy that does all of these incredible data visualizations from information from places like Facebook, and then see the demo pod company that was voted best in class (You didn't even mention all of the stuff you learned from the companies in the booths).
Two days. More developer information than you can shake a stick at. Mobile, APIs, cloud standards, OAuth, Hadoop, Cassandra, NoSQL -- you're loaded up and ready to get home so you can absorb all of this.
Gluecon: I hope you'll join us.