The third and final day of the CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2017 (North America) is underway, and as usual it has been a fantastic few days. Attendees have been truly spoilt with a plethora of speakers from all over the world – hearing from operators, users, vendors, developers, service providers and business owners.
Although the CloudStack conference started properly on Wednesday, Tuesday also had lots going on for attendees, with an all-day hackathon, and a day of CloudStack training for those new to the technology. The hackathon was a great way to start the conference, encouraging early engagement, discussion, and collaboration.
The Wednesday morning keynote set the tone for what to expect. Giles Sirett (ShapeBlue), Ian Rae (CloudOps), Sergey Levitskiy (Autodesk), Simon Weller (ENA) and Marcelo Oliveira (Cable & Wireless) took turns talking, between them creating a vibrant, exciting and positive atmosphere drawing on personal experience of how CloudStack drives their businesses. The key messages that came out of these talks resonated throughout the conference:
“DIRECTION IS DECIDED BY THE COMMUNITY”
“IT JUST WORKS”
“QUICK DEPLOYMENT”
“STABILITY”
“MATURITY AND THE OVERALL RELIABILITY”
“GOVERNANCE IS IMPORTANT TO US”
“IT SCALES WELL”
The talks, demos, discussions and collaboration continue for a few hours yet, and hopefully on into what will surely be another beautiful Miami evening! Having made lots of new friends, listened to lots of interesting talks and experienced the passion and continuing innovation of this community, I am already looking forward to the next conference.
Steve is ShapeBlue’s COO and is responsible for all day-to-day administrative and operational functions of the business, including the consulting, programme management, and support functions.
Involved with CloudStack since 2012, Steve has led several large customer engagements including a number of major public and private cloud deployments; co-ordinated and developed worldwide teams and helped implement and deliver an enterprise grade support product.
Prior to ShapeBlue, Steve held senior technical, project and account management roles in enterprise IT outsourcing companies where he gained domain experience in the finance, professional services and defence markets.
Away from work, Steve is a father, keen guitarist, snowboarder and singer (not necessarily in that order).
Away from work, Steve is a music lover and semi-professional musician. Although he doesn’t speak at many technology conferences, he can sometimes be heard providing the evening entertainment.
