Getting into the Cloud(s)

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

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Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and Director of Software Engineering for Engine Yard, a scalable Ruby hosting platform. He has been active in the ruby community for over 4 years with contributions to many open source projects such as Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is the author of Deploying Rails Application for the pragmatic programmers and is an active speaker at many ruby and Cloud computing based events.

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Jeff Barr makes frequent conference and user group appearances, contributes to the AWS Blog, and also meets with individual developers. Jeff has operated his own consulting practice and also spent time at Microsoft. Jeff holds a BS Degree from The American University and did graduate studies at George Washington University.

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Jason Hoffman is the CTO and founder of Joyent and previously founded TextDrive Inc and Strongspace LLC. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA, a PhD from UCSD and has backgrounds in cancer biology, bioinformatics, grid computing and collaborative applications.

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Peter is a recognized expert in scalable infrastructure technologies including operating systems, networks and storage. He has unique experience in delivering successfully new types of products in a fast-paced startup environment. Peter is the architect of the core technology behind 3Tera’s AppLogic grid operating system that enables utility computing for SaaS and Web 2.0 services. He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four technology companies. Prior to 3Tera (the NetworkWorld’s Category Breaker Award winner for 2007), he founded Z-force, a storage networking company that pioneered file switching and NAS aggregation and was named one of Network World’s “Top 10 Startups to Watch”; and Object Dynamics, a software company providing network infrastructure software. In the last 20 years Peter has authored 24 patents and has over 30 innovations in the areas of operating systems, multi-threading, kernel mode and real-time software, network protocols, file systems and computing resource aggregation.

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Jonathan Bryce started his career off working as a web developer for the managed hosting giant, Rackspace. During his tenure at Rackspace, Bryce teamed up with co-worker Todd Morey and created a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site—all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision, along with help from former employer Rackspace, was turned into Mosso. Currently, Bryce oversees all operations for over 30,000 managed websites served by Mosso.

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Paul Colton founded Aptana in 2005 with a vision for streamlining Ajax applications from development through deployment. Prior to starting Aptana, Paul founded several technology companies including Live Software. At Live Software, Paul helped define the Servlet API specification and also created JRun, the leading commercial Servlet and JSP engine. After Live Software was acquired by Allaire Corporation (and subsequently by Macromedia and Adobe), Paul took time to explore Ajax and rich internet application development. Aptana, now with over 2,000,000 downloads of its open source Ajax product suite, is the result of that exploration.

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