Sponsor: None! Sad panda.

Feature Presentation: Building better looking HTML dashboards/apps- A cheaters guide

Ever had to create a webapp, a web dashboard or a quick HTML page, but had no clue how to go about it from the UI side of things? Had trouble with understanding how to make a vanilla HTML page, “pretty”? Struggling with how to make your page look consistent across browsers and look “nice” on the tablet and phone and laptop?

Then this talk is for you!

During the session, I’ll cover everything you need to know about Twitter Bootstrap, a framework that lets your build sleek, intuitive and powerful front-ends. By the end of the session, you’ll be able to create neat looking UI’s for all those cloud apps you wanted to build, but didn’t know how to.

Bio: Karthik Gaekwad, Senior Web Software Engineer Karthik is a web software engineer with 9 years of experience building web applications, API’s and UI’s in different technologies. With both enterprise and startup experience, he is most passionate about quickly delivering products and product features, and having fun while doing it. He can be reached on twitter at @iteration1.

Sponsor: Rackspace

Speaker: “Encrypt Everything, Everywhere” by Dustin Kirkland of Gazzang.

72% of the 21 million health care records that have been compromised in the United States since September of 2009 should have been trivially protected using comprehensive encryption of the data before being written to disk. See: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/breachnotificationrule/breachtool.html

A busy cloud compute node from OpenStack or Amazon EC2 might spin up hundreds or thousands of instances per day. Ephemeral, block, and object storage – each and every one of these should always be encrypted before being written to the underlying physical media. The good news is that multiple excellent file and disk encryption solutions exist in Linux, such as eCryptfs and dm-crypt, making encrypting everything simple and cost-effective. The challenge for organizations lies in how to manage the crypto keys. In this session, we'll discuss encryption and key management best practices and examine some use cases for companies that store sensitive and regulated data in the cloud. Bio: Dustin Kirkland, CTO, Gazzang Dustin Kirkland sets and drives the technical vision, competitive strategy and product roadmap for Gazzang. He is also the chief architect of Gazzang zTrustee, the company's breakthrough universal key management solution. Dustin has more than 10 years of experience developing and deploying Linux and other open source-related solutions and is a co-author of eCryptfs, an enterprise-class, stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux.

Sponsor: Canonical

Speaker: “Network Virtualization with OpenStack Quantum” by Miguel Lavalle. Check out the slides on Slideshare! The outline is:

1. OpenStack overview and how Quantum fits in the overall landscape
2. Quantum API and the main level 2 abstraction
3. Quantum's plug-in architecture
4. Demo
5. How Quantum and OpenStack compute (Nova) interact when connecting a VM to a virtual network
6. OpenVSwitch plug-in internals
7. Configuring OpenStack development environment (DevStack) for OpenVSwitch

Miguel Lavalle is 30 years veteran of the IT industry, with a strong focus on enterprise customers. He has worked for Digital Equipment, Compaq Computer and Hewlett-Packard, in a wide range of positions, including software development, alliance management, sales and professional services management. Most recently he has focused his efforts on becoming a core developer for OpenStack Quantum.

Sponsor: Amazon Web Services

The Twelve Clouds of Christmas lightning demos were:

1. James Wickett demoes gauntlt (security testing in the cloud)
2. Karthik Gaekwad demoes Stormpath (hosted auth in the cloud)
3. Chris Koenig demos Microsoft Azure (maybe mobile/maybe site publishing)
4. Allan MacInnis demoes something cutting edge from AWS (TBD)
5. Jeffrey Palermo talks on How to launch and run a services business in the cloud
6. Alberto Alonso gives and introduction to Node.JS including demos
7. Bill Hackett promises to demo something
8. Nirmal Ranganathan will talk about Rackspace OpenCloud Products Overview
9. Everett Towes will do an introduction of the Rackspace open cloud SDKs and a quick demo of the Java SDK
10. David Alves will do demo of working with CloudSoft and application management in the cloud.
11. Joe Gardner will demo something AWS Cloudformationey
12. Peco Karayanev will demo Troubleshooting apps with Big Data (Cloud Edition)
13. Adam Miller will demo OpenShift - The Open Source PaaS from Red Hat
14. Estuardo Robles will demo Toopher's mobile+cloud-based authentication which increases security without increasing agony
15. Prabhat Jha will demo a real time mobile app performance analytics built using AWS techs and some homegrown techs.
16. Miguel Zuñiga will demo http://www.openescalar.org/ , a project that he has created for giving something back to the opensource cloud community

James Wickett with gauntlt and Estuardo Robles with Toopher tied for the best presentation, after a quick rock-scissors-paper, Wickett won the iPad Mini gifted by Bazaarvoice!

Sponsor: Bazaarvoice

Tristan Slominski spoke on “Crosstalk: SOA for the rest of us… in JavaScript.”

Topic: Crosstalk is a cloud platform for quickly implementing and prototyping Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) in JavaScript. Crosstalk runs on the Crosstalk Swarm, which is implemented using the Erlang “Let it crash” philosophy. Crosstalk has no single master node and relies on emergent behavior for Swarm management. The presentation will cover the reasons why Crosstalk was created, example code demonstrating Crosstalk functionality, as well as some general information on the infrastructure.

Speaker: Tristan Slominski believes in challenging what is possible. He believes in making tomorrow simpler and more wondrous than today. He does this by building technologies that empower people. Tristan is Co-founder and CTO of Crosstalk Systems, Inc., the company behind Crosstalk.

Eric Tschetter spoke on “Druid - Real-time Analytics at a Billion Rows per Second.” Download the presentation in PDF!

Topic: Druid is an open source distributed system in use at Metamarkets (http://www.metamarkets.com) to facilitate rapid exploration of high dimensional spaces. We use Druid to expose impression monetization data to ad tech companies along any arbitrary combination of demographic, content and sales-based dimensions. One Druid cluster currently exposes a data set of >40 billion rows of data representing >2 trillion impressions in hypercubes of varying dimensionality (largest is 28 dimensions) while allowing for exploration using top lists and timeseries in sub-second latencies. The tech talk will be a discussion of the design considerations and architecture of the system with a little bit of self promotion mixed in. The Druid code can be found at http://www.github.com/metamx/druid

Speaker: Eric Tschetter is co-founder of MetaMarkets.

Sponsor: Dell

Speaker: Mike Craigue of Dell will speak on “Dell's Security Consulting team–how do we interact with Cloud Services offerings?”

How does Dell evaluate a cloud provider, and what is our perspective on the CSA's Controls Matrix? (5 minutes) How does Dell's Security Consulting team assist with Services offerings? (5 minutes) Discussion: what has to be considered on the service provider side in the event that a customer VM is compromised? (discussion, 20 minutes) what level of monitoring is appropriate? what is the incident management sequence of events? (notify the customer, disable network access, have customer address the issue, restore service…) How would Dell advise internal Dell teams who want to use a Dell Services offerings, for example with Infrastructure as a Service? (20 minutes) Discussion: How do you make decisions about what data to host in the cloud? Should you reserve cloud hosting for lower-risk data? (discussion, 20 minutes)

Sponsor: Craig Vyvial of Rackspace provided grub and, in a first for ACUG, beer!

Topic: Bazaarvoice talked about Nexus, their next generation cloud infrastructure built using AWS best practices and tools like VPC, autoscaling groups, and CloudFormation. We'll go through an overview of Nexus and talk about the design decisions. We'll then go through some CloudFormation basics to help you get started on your own projects.

Speaker: Victor Trac is the Cloud Systems Architect at Bazaarvoice, Inc, where he helps to design and build tools and systems that reach out to hundreds of millions of users world-wide. Prior to Bazaarvoice, he worked for the US Department of Defense building real-time collaboration systems using Open Source Software.

Sponsor: James Wickett of Austin OWASP on behalf of AppSec USA 2012, which will be here in Austin!

Speaker: Craig Vyvial of Rackspace presented with others from Rackspace. He has been a software engineer for 5 years and he has been at Rackspace for a little over a year working on Cloud Databases.

He spoke about building a Paas system on Openstack with Reddwarf. Rackspace will give an overview of the architecture of Openstack and projects available in the ecosystem.

Sponsor and Speaker : Max Ramsay of Amazon Web Services

Sponsor: Eucalyptus

Speaker: Jenny Loza

Jenny gave an overview new features in Eucalyptus, and let us know of ways to participate in the Eucalyptus community. The slides for the presentation are here .

As usual, Brad Knowles made a recording, and has produced two very nice recordings in m4a format and mp3 format .

Sponsor: Cloud Security Alliance, Austin Chapter

Speaker: None, we did openspaces.

Sponsor: Puppet Labs

Speaker: Dan Bode

Dan presented an excellent introduction to CloudFormation, and his work in integrating it with Puppet. You can view his slides, hear the audio recording in mp3 format, and see his source code repository.

Sponsor: Canonical

Sponsor: BazaarVoice

Topic: The Twelve Clouds of Christmas was a series of 5 minute lightning demos given by the membership! They were great. There is video of the session with, sadly, poor audio on YouTube.

1. Black Friday - How BazaarVoice Prepares for Scaling, by Chris Krough (double length slot since they're the sponsor!)
2. Your Own Personal Cloud - a vagrant (personal virtualization) demo, by James Wickett (@wickett)
3. Twelve Clouds In One - a jclouds (multicloud library) demo, by William Hackett
4. Get Your Rocks Off - a Rocks Cluster Distribution (HPC on AWS) demo, by Craig Dupree
5. Buy Four Golden Rings, Get One Free! - a Salesforce.com demo, by Edna Tovar
6. But It's Not Free Any More! - a Google App Engine demo, by Rob Hirschfeld
7. Server Abstraction & Orchestration – a Rightscale demo, by George Miranda
8. Multi-Cloud App Deployments - a VMware Cloud Foundry demo by Dave McCrory
9. Clusterfudge! - a Cluster Chef demo by Nathaniel Eliot
10. Source, build, and test your software in the cloud - how Headspring does it - by Jeffrey Palermo
11. My Letters to Santa: Messaging with Twilio by Karthik Gaekwad (@iteration1)
12. A Cassandra on AMIs demo by Joaquin Casares - Slides

Sponsor: Dell

Speaker: Currently, Greg Althaus, Dell Inc, is Lead Engineer for Crowbar. Greg has worked with Dell Cloud Solutions for the past two years working on various cloud solutions from Joyent to Crowbar with Openstack and Hadoop. Prior to this, Greg was chief architect at Mirage Networks building network security fabrics. Before that, he worked in IBM’s AIX networking group.

Title: Dell Crowbar Deep Dive: Behind the scenes of a cloud infrastructure deployer

Subject: Dell Crowbar is an open source cloud deployer that leverages and extends Opscode Chef to build bare metal clouds. The project is Apache 2 licensed, hardware agnostic and includes deployment suites for both OpenStack and Hadoop. This session, led by Greg Althaus, will show you how to operate Crowbar and then dive under the covers to show how it operates, interoperates with Chef, and can be extended. In addition to talking about Crowbar, Greg will be able to field questions about deploying OpenStack and Hadoop. This is the most in depth public session we’ve ever offered about Crowbar.

You can listen to a recording of the meeting here courtesy Brad Knowles and there's extensive annotations on Rob Hirschfeld's blog here.

Sponsor: InfoChimps

Speaker: Nathaniel Eliot from InfoChimps briefly (~15 minutes) presented on where they are talking their operations, which are Chef/AWS based. The rest of the meeting was a lively unconference.

Audio recording in mp4 format

Sponsors: Blue Pines Technologies and Global Gate Systems

Speaker: Wyatt Tall from Pervasive will speak on their cloud integration platform. Pervasive Integration Agent is an application that downloads, installs, schedules, and runs pre-built integrations on the Pervasive DataCloud platform. Agent can also keep integrations up to date with any bug fixes or new functionality as updates become available.

Key points:

• We wrote this application to use cloud infrastructure to manage, support and distribute local integrations.
• It’s interesting how useful the data cloud can be even when you take away its main use case (running integrations in the cloud)
• The role security plays in designing a runtime environment that is linked to the cloud distribution
• Future ideas for areas to grow the product

Audio recording of meeting in mp3 format.

Thanks to Copperegg for sponsoring the meeting.

Speakers:

• Eric Anderson, Co-Founder, CopperEgg spoke about their recently launched RevealCloud, and the challenges of building the back end of a SaaS app that needed to be highly scalable, with an on-demand architecture, process data in real-time and support 1000's of user sites.
• Mike Pav with Spanning Cloud Apps' Nagios setup
• Alberto Alonso with his monitoring product that grew out of his consulting work
• Ernest Mueller with NI's cloud monitoring setup

Audio recording in mp3 format

Our sponsor fell through. We managed to avoid resorting to cannibalism.

Jason Cumberland, Director of Client Services at OpSource, provided a hands on overview of the OpSource Cloud, including a demonstration of the process to provision and de-provision servers, networks, and storage in the OpSource Cloud via web GUI or REST-based API. OpSource is a SaaS-focused Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company who provides both public & private Cloud solutions as well as traditional Managed Hosting services.

Thanks to MCF Tech Solutions for sponsoring the meeting.

Art Ardolino from vConstruct spoke on Helping Business Move to the Cloud: vConstruct would like to share the our experiences and challenges helping businesses adopt cloud-based systems, and the technology that we are creating to make this process easy and repeatable.”

Mike Pav, VP of Engineering at Spanning Cloud Apps will host a technical discussion of the different parts of the Spanning business that touch Google, Amazon, and other Cloud Providers. This ranges from the obvious Google Domain for email, docs, … to their use of the Google Document List APIs, Marketplace Billing, and Provisioning APIs that allow Spanning Backup to backup and restore content for all users within a domain. Additionally, Spanning uses other Google services to run their business by integrating Google managed content into Salesforce.com and displaying operational metrics using Google's Charting.

Thanks to vConstruct for sponsoring the meeting.

Jeffrey Palermo (COO, @jeffreypalermo), Kevin Hurwitz (Chief Architect), and Pedro Reys (Consultant, @pedroreys) from Headspring (@headspring) spoke on “How Headspring Does Business in the Cloud: A Technical Perspective.” They detailed how they use a variety of SaaS providers to satisfy all their “IT” needs from source control and build servers to customer communication.

Thanks to FreedomOSS for sponsoring the meeting.

Joel Davne, CEO of FreedomOSS, presented on Amazon AWS Case Studies, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and FreedomOSS vNOC, their cloud management platform.

Eric Valenzuela from Full360 presented on using Chef with Amazon.

Thanks to Pervasive Software for sponsoring the meeting.

John Wussow from Sneaky Games presented on how he used memcached, MongoDB, and Flash client/server communication with Microsoft Azure to make Fantasy Kingdoms, a Facebook game.

Thanks to Puppet Labs for sponsoring the meeting.

Jeff McCune from Puppet Labs did a demonstration of quick start installation using Puppet Enterprise which includes a best practices base install of Puppet Master and corresponding Dashboard instance.

William Oellermann from Opusgrid presented on his Texas-based startup that is looking to enable Integration as a Service through their cloud-based products and services. OpusGrid was started by former Microsoft employees that developed the Managed Services Engine(MSE) and many other customer-driven SOA solutions. They will be providing an early preview of their capabilities and strategy that will be available this year to bring virtualization to the world of APIs and next gen applications.

Thanks to Convio for sponsoring the meeting.

Ernest did a great job introducing the group to Azure, Microsoft's cloud offering. He even did a real time demo on deploying a sample .NET application using Visual Studio and its Azure integration. The slide deck, Inside Microsoft Azure, is posted on SlideShare.

All and all it was a great introduction (as you would expect from this group). None of the marketing hype and plenty of technical details with drawbacks and workarounds to a lot of the issues.

As cloud offerings mature, it is clear that you have a lot of homework to do before choosing the right provider. Each application is different, so be ready to make the decision based on your application needs and not on anything that the vendor tells you.

If you are developing on .NET you really need to consider Azure and what it offers. If you are using 3rd party systems and don't rely on .NET you should then consider other vendors at the same time. As Ernest pointed out… what is the value proposition?

Thanks to National Instruments for sponsoring the meeting.

We had a great presentation on OpenStack by Chuck Thier and Anne Gentle of Rackspace. Check out the slides!

Of special interest, this meeting covered openstack's implementation of Rackspace's openfiles. This is a massive distributed file/object system that kept simplicity as a high priority while keeping high standards for availability and redundancy. Kudos to Rackspace for providing such infrastructure on an open source basis and working with NASA on OpenStack.

Thoughtworks sponsored this meeting - thanks to them for that!

Cloud Colloquium

We saw a series of presentations on what group members are currently working on in the cloud.

OData - Craig Vyvial - Pervasive Software - OData Presentation

Currently developing a producer of OData for our reporting database. Using an open source Java OData library call OData4j I have implemented HTTP Basic security for OData by implementing a custom login module for Glassfish that authenticates against our current users. I have documented the process of creating this module on my blog for anyone interested.

DevOps - Chris Hilton - ThoughtWorks, Inc. - DevOps Presentation

An overview of DevOps and its relation to cloud computing.

PIE - Peco Karayanev and Ernest Mueller - National Instruments - On Slideshare

The Programmable Infrastructure Environment, an in-house developed system which uses model driven automation to provision, control, deploy, and monitor our cloud systems. Go from source control to running systems!

Taking Your Traditional Software to the Cloud - John Mikula - Pervasive

Moving Your SaaS from a Colo to the Cloud - Josh Arnold

We had a good time as always. There are a lot of challenges that you must consider to deploy your systems in the cloud. This meeting made us think about topics from provisioning to configuration to monitoring. Kyle Falkenhagen of ServiceMesh covered some topics such us:

• Security → look at things like tripwire, encrypt file systems, etc.
• Monitoring → Are APIs available to know when instances go on/off? Ask your provider.
• Etc.

Some products to look for are: cloudkick, rightscale, ganglia and of course servicemesh has a fully integrated solution.

And to leave you with a golden nugget from the meeting, here are two superb uses for cloud computing:

• Testing (from quantity and variety points of view). Do you have labs full of computers that you only use a few days a year?
• Virtual Desktops for road warriors

A lot of good information on certification programs and what they really mean. We hear a lot about SAS70 and other programs, get an introduction of what they all mean and what you should know about the providers certification programs.

The presentation by Jason Cumberland from OpSource can be obtained from: http://opsource.na6.acrobat.com/p76621461/

Great introduction to the cloud and what it means under different scenarios. You can get to the presentation that was given by Michael Coté at his site: http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2010/08/24/acug-preso/

Update: Great turnout last evening! Around 60 people, if my nose count is correct.

We plan on meeting monthly in the early evening with one in-depth presenter and and several brief 'lightning talks' on topics of interest from experts within our community. Michael Cote of Redmonk will be our in-depth presenter at the August meeting; watch for more details soon.

Thanks to all who came, and spread the word to others who may be interested!

Original notice below:

We were so encouraged by the participation in CloudCamp Austin at Pervasive a couple of weeks ago that now we’re wanting to kick off an Austin Cloud User Group! CloudCamp showed us that there’s a smart, engaged, passionate community of cloud technologists in Austin and we’d like to give folks a chance to get together F2F on a regular basis to swap ideas, showcase innovative cloud initiatives, and build connections. Here’s a general agenda for a kickoff session on Tuesday, July 27:

Agenda

6:00 - 6:20 : Meet and greet with pizza and soft drinks
6:20 - 6:40 : Round-the-room - introduce yourself, what you're doing and plan to do on the cloud
6:40 - 7:20 : Organizational discussion - how often to meet?  When?  What format?