QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Colin Humphreys, CTO at Carrenza

Colin Humphreys

Biography: Colin Humphreys

Colin Humphreys is Director of Technology at Carrenza. He has spent the last twelve years sitting on the fence between development and operations, delivering solutions for eBay, Volkswagen, Paypal, Cineworld, and others. Colin and the team at Carrenza won a UK IT Industry Award in 2009 with Comic Relief, and were medallists in 2010 with Tribal DDB. He is passionate about “Infrastructure as Code”, “Continuous Delivery”, “Devops”, “PaaS”, “Agile Testing”, and various other buzzwords." at http://blog.hatofmonkeys.com/

Presentation: Lessons Learned in Deploying PaaS

Track: PaaS - Practical Cloud Computing for Developers / Time: Thursday 11:50 - 12:50 / Location: Westminster

If you’ve tried deploying your custom applications to “the cloud”, you’ve probably realized that you need more than just virtualized infrastructure to deploy and run your applications successfully. That’s why Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with public services like Heroku, EngineYard and DotCloud have gained popularity. But how do you get the benefits of a PaaS that is secure, private, and customizable if your company doesn’t permit you to use a public PaaS? Hear about the lessons Carrenza learned when they deployed a private PaaS using Stackato (based on Cloud Foundry) in a VMware environment for their clients. Colin will share how they made reproducable custom environments using an installation and customization framework (Chef/Puppet) on top of Stackato; how they linked their continuous integration (CI) system to Stackato, used a consistent deployment interface to reduce risk, and URL-mappings for easy blue-green deployments. Hear how Carrenza manages the scalability of their private PaaS operationally and uses logging and monitoring to ensure applications are meeting up-time guarantees.

Presentation: PaaS - present and future (panel)

Track: PaaS - Practical Cloud Computing for Developers / Time: Thursday 13:50 - 14:50 / Location: Westminster

This panel brings together both users and providers of public and private PaaS solutions for a wide range of programming language ecosystems. The panel will explore the state of PaaS today. The panelists will describe their experiences developing and consuming PaaS offerings. You will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of PaaS and where the technology is heading.

Training: Code to Cloud: The Cloud Foundry in-depth, hands-on tutorial from the experts

Track: Tutorial / Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Rutherford Room

CloudFoundry is the open source Platform as a Service (PAAS) project initiated by VMware. Among the most exciting aspects of CloudFoundry is its openness and developer-friendliness: CloudFoundry supports applications written in a range of popular languages and frameworks to de deployed with virtually no restrictions and in a variety of environments: public or private clouds, potentially reusing exiting hardware.

This tutorial aims to introduce CloudFoundry in a very practical way. It is broken down as follows:

    •    Introduction to CloudFoundry
    •    Tooling: VMC and STS
    •    Working with Micro CloudFoundry to build Private Clouds
    •    The CloudFoundry Development lifecycle
    •    Writing CloudFoundry enabled apps with Spring, Lift, and Node.js
    •    Creating and managing services: MySql, MongoDB, Redis, etc..
    •    Scaling, Autoscaling and Clustering your Cloud
    •    Management and Monitoring of Cloud Foundry and Hosted Applications

This tutorial is perfect for people who want to get their hands dirty building their own Private Clouds and how to build and scale a Production-Strength Cloud Foundry environment. Full of war stories from the trenches, and given by contributors to the Cloud Foundry project, this tutorial is a no-holds-barred, in-depth take on Cloud Foundry and how to make the most of it for your own applications.
 
Atteedees must bring their own laptop with the following software installed: 
  1. Ruby 1.9.2
  2. The latest version of RubyGems
  3. VMware Workstation, Player or Fusion to be able to run Micro Cloud Foundry (only one of those 3 is needed)
  4. Optionally, STS (SpringSource Tool Suite) should be installed as well