DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free “Expo Plus” registration option. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to ‘free’ for delegates who register during this offer perios. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site.

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Software development, like manufacturing, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.

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Leysin American School is an exclusive, private boarding school located in Leysin, Switzerland. Leysin selected an OpenStack-powered, private cloud as a service to manage multiple applications and provide development environments for students across the institution.
Seeking to meet rigid data sovereignty and data integrity requirements while offering flexible, on-demand cloud resources to users, Leysin identified OpenStack as the clear choice to round out the school’s cloud strategy. Additionally, the school sought a partner to provide OpenStack infrastructure deployment and operations expertise. They ultimately selected Blue Box’s Private Cloud as a Service, powered by OpenStack, leveraging Blue Box’s Zurich, Switzerland data center.

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The cloud is one of those technology trends that seems to be perpetually on the cusp of becoming ubiquitous. But if recent analyst reports are any indication, cloud’s breakthrough moment is imminent. Late last year, Gartner predicted that in 2016, the bulk of new IT spend would shift to the public cloud, and that by the end of 2017, nearly half of all enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments.
But if cloud has been around for so long, why will it take so long for cloud to become the dominant source of IT spend?

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Google has offered an olive branch to eligible startups, promising them $100,000 (£61,500) in Cloud Platform credits to get their companies off the ground.

The initiative, with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin name of ‘Google Cloud Platform for Startups’, was announced at the Google for Entrepreneurs Global Partner Summit and gives companies access to the search giant’s support team 24/7, as well as access to the firm’s technical solutions team.

“This offer supports our core Google Cloud Platform philosophy,” wrote developer relations director Julie Pearl in a blog post. “We want developers to focus on code; not worry about managing infrastructure. Starting today, startups can take advantage of this offer and begin using the same infrastructure platform we use at Google.”

Not just anyone can chance their arm for Google’s bucks, however: eligible companies have to be part of an approved Accelerator, Incubator or VC fund, have less than $5m in funding, have less than $500,000 in annual revenue, and not have had any previous Cloud Platform credits.

Google isn’t alone in providing support to startups, however. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a similar initiative in place called Portfolio Package, while Rackspace pledged £250,000 for the same cause under the Rackspace Startups Programme. It’s with Amazon in mind that Google appears to have taken this philanthropic leap.

Google recently hired former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens to run its cloud platforms division

The search giant recently hired former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens to run its cloud platforms division. Stevens unexpectedly quit Red Hat at the end of last month, leading commentators to muse about his influence running Google’s cloudy operations going forward.

Reaction to the news was generally positive. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, seemingly drew inspiration from the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch for his reply:

Google offering startups $100K in cloud credits. When we started out we had to build our servers, and walk to the office up hill both ways.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) September 12, 2014

“It has been amazing to watch Snapchat send over 700 million photos and videos a day, and Khan Academy teach millions of students,” Pearl added. “We look forward to helping the next generation of startups launch great products.”

You can find out more about the Google Cloud Platform for Startups here.

Read more: Harnessing the power of Google’s cloud: Google BigQuery Analytics book extract

All too many discussions about DevOps conclude that the solution is an all-purpose player: developer and operations guru, complete with pager for round-the-clock duty. For most organizations that is not the way forward. In his session at DevOps Summit, Bart Copeland, President & CEO of ActiveState Software, will discuss how to achieve the agility and speed of end-to-end automation without requiring an organization stocked with Supermen and Superwomen.

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It’s the Great Convergence! That is, the convergence of the IoT and WebRTC. “From telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for WebRTC, real time calls and messaging,” says Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Telestar. Ivelin will be one of the featured speakers at our @WebRTCSummit, to be held Nov 4-5 as part of the overall @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo conference and exhibition Nov 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.

In his session, Ivelin promises to share “some of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm – the open source telephony platform from Telestax.”

Unmistaken Identity
@WebRTCSummit Conference Chair Peter Dunkley, based in the UK at Acision, says “we are reaching the end of the beginning with WebRTC and real systems using this technology have begun to appear. One challenge that faces every WebRTC deployment–in some form or another–is identity management.”

“For example,” he says, “if you have an existing service – possibly built on a variety of different PaaS/SaaS offerings – and you want to add real-time communications you are faced with a challenge relating to user management, authentication, authorization, and validation. Service providers will want to use their existing identities, but these will have credentials already that are (hopefully) irreversibly encoded.”

Peter will look at how this identity problem can be solved and discuss ways to use existing web identities for real-time communication in his session.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Representing another dimension of convergence, Keith McFarlane of LiveOps asks, “Can call centers hang up the phones for good?”

His session will focus on how Intuitive Solutions did just that. “WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model,” he says.

“Since the initial buzz of WebRTC, the ability to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat and P2P file sharing without plugins has been touted as a potential game changer for many industries,” McFarlane notes. “What are the parameters around this technology and its placement? Is it secure enough for prime time? Will WebRTC magnify OTT threat for telcos? Is WebRTC really that big of a deal for consumers?”

Clear Conference Calls? Whaaat?
The convergence also implies collaboration—lots of collaboration—and speaker Alan Kraemer of Technology Marketing notes that “while great strides have been made relative to the video aspects of remote collaboration, audio technology has basically stagnated. Typically all audio is mixed to a single monaural stream and emanates from a single point, such as a speakerphone or a speaker associated with a video monitor.”

Alan will have a very cool demo of “spatial conferencing” with WebRTC, in which confernce-call attendees can pinpoint the locations of all participants, thereby eliminating much of the mass confusion found in these calls.

“The concept of a small speaker unit placed in front of the conference participant that can create a full three dimensional sound field with user interaction supporting free placement of individual conference participants anywhere within that field is introduced,” he says. “This is integrated with WebRTC to create a seemless interactive video or teleconference experience that, from an acoustic standpoint, closely resembles the experience of a live meeting in a conference room.”

The P2P Shift
Yet another aspect of WebRTC convergence and where it’s going will be presented by Erik Lagerway of Hookflash. “P2P RTC will impact the landscape of communications, shifting from traditional telephony style communications models to OTT (Over-The-Top) cloud assisted & PaaS (Platform as a Service) communication services,” he says.
“The P2P shift will impact many areas of our lives, from mobile communication, human interactive web services, RTC and telephony infrastructure, user federation, security and privacy implications, business costs, and scalability. This presentation will walk through the shifting landscape of traditional telephone and voice services to the modern P2P RTC era of OTT cloud assisted services.”

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Code Halos – aka “digital fingerprints” – are the key organizing principle to understand a) how dumb things become smart and b) how to monetize this dynamic.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Ben Pring, Co-Director (AVP), Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant Technology Solutions, will outline research, analysis and recommendations from his recently published book on this phenomena on the way leading edge organizations like GE and Disney are unlocking the IoT opportunity and what steps your organization should be taking to position itself for the next platform of digital competition.

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Isaac Saldana is co-founder and president of SendGrid. The roots of the company were born of his frustration in getting emails delivered through apps he was building, he tells us. So he started a company with the snappy name SMTPAPI.com, which as one might expect, featured an SMTP API. He applied and was accepted to the Techstars program, which calls itself the “#1 startup accelerator in the world” and is based in Boulder, CO. Techstars receive mentorship and $118,000 in funding in exchange for a 7-10% share in their company.

After completing the Techstars program in July 2009, Isaac got seed funding for the re-named company SendGrid in November of that year and Series A funding in April 2010. He also met Jim Franklin through Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, and Franklin now serves as SendGrid’s CEO.

Once briefed on this history, we had a couple of other questions for him:

Cloud Computing Journal: So can you give us an idea of the scale of the services SendGrid provides today?

Isaac Saldana: Delivering wanted email to the inbox is increasingly complex for businesses who rely on it as a primary vehicle to grow and retain their customer base. SendGrid is the global leader in providing technology solutions that dramatically increase the deliverability of application-generated and customer engagement email.

SendGrid has built a trusted, globally-distributed cloud platform that successfully delivers over 13 billion emails each month. To date, the company has sent over 250 billion emails, representing 2% of global non-spam email traffic.

CCJ: And who is your customer base?

Isaac: SendGrid’s customer base includes best-of-breed Internet and mobile-based applications such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pandora, Hubspot, Spotify, Uber, Linkedin and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises.

SendGrid’s customers also include a large community of developers who build cloud-based applications that leverage our platform. In total, SendGrid has had over 175,000 customers.

CCJ: How do you see email evolving in an era of mobile devices?

Isaac: According to data from the U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report from Movable Ink, 65 percent of email is now being accessed via mobile devices in the US.

As a result, email is becoming an important tool for customer engagement via mobile devices.

But, while email opens on mobile devices have gone up, the time spent reading emails has decreases and as such the content, frequency and messages in email must be customized and optimized for mobile. SendGrid has several recommendations has for optimizing an email campaign on a mobile device and has conducted its own recent study in the US and UK about which devices are being used to open email.

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