The cloud needs hardware. Learn about its future at Structure
One of my favorite parts of Structure has always been the yearly updates our speakers provide on the most cutting-edge infrastructure tools available to the world.
Sure, it’s a conference about the cloud, and the wonderful feeling that results from not having to deal with setting up and maintaining server racks and networking gear. But the advances that are made each year in chips, infrastructure strategy, and storage are the foundation of public cloud services, and knowing what might be possible in a few years provides an advantage.
We’ve assembled another great roster of those speakers for Structure 2015, just four weeks away. On November 18th and 19th in downtown San Francisco, some of the most prominent people in enterprise infrastructure technology will be speaking about their latest developments and future plans.
— Over at Intel, Diane Bryant, who will kick off Structure 2015 on the 18th, is in charge of what has probably become the most important division of the chip maker, given the steady decline in the PC market. At one point, it wasn’t clear whether Intel would react to the cloud era the same way it reacted to the mobile era: that is, by sitting it out.
But Intel has rebounded strongly selling its chips to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, as well as other datacenter operators, in ever-increasing numbers, as shown by the company’s most recent financial results. Key to that performance was a chip Intel announced last year at Structure that could be customized for specific customers, and hopefully Bryant will have an update on the company’s roadmap for future such products.
— Facebook’s Jay Parikh is responsible for building the infrastructure that supports one of the most incredible phenomenons of the 21st century. Facebook’s monthly and daily user numbers are staggering — 968 million daily active users and 1.49 billion monthly active users at last count — and those users are sharing and more photos and videos every year, especially as media companies embrace Facebook as a native distribution channel.
Facebook’s work on bringing the Open Compute Project to life has also been impressive. With former Facebook legend Frank Frankovsky having stepped down from the leadership of that group in favor of current Facebook executive Jason Taylor, I’m curious to hear more from Parikh about the role Facebook intends to play in the future shaping this very interesting project.
— Quentin Clark from SAP is scheduled to give an interesting talk on how to improve latency in the datacenter. We talk a lot about processing power and scalability, but latency is as big a roadblock to performance gains as anything, and Stacey Higginbotham of Fortune (and former Structure event lead) will help Clark walk us through the importance of planning around latency.
— Infrastructure advances always need a reality check, unfortunately: sometimes the marketing department is better than the engineering department. With that in mind, we’ll convene a panel of operators — Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs, Bob Muglia of Snowflake Computing (and Microsoft fame) and Jay Rossiter of Yahoo — to give us the lowdown on which tech trends and developments are here to stay, and which ones are passing fads.
— We’ll wrap up Structure 2015 with a discussion that promises to be one of the most interesting ones of the week: the future of the datacenter. Tamara Budec of Digital Reality and William Dougherty of Raging Wire will explain how the datacenters of the future are evolving to meet the needs of future workloads.
We hope you’ll join us for what is sure to be two very interesting days charting the future course of the cloud. More information about the schedule is available here, and you can register here.
