AWS APIs: What's the Big Deal?

From the blogosphere to news stories to Meetups to OpenStack Summits, the topic of embracing the Amazon Web Services API and architecture as a part of the OpenStack project is a hot topic.

In this meetup, we'll hear from Randy Bias of Cloudscaling, Nati Shalom of Gigaspaces, and Alex Freedland of Mirantis. who will talk about their perspectives on the topic and take questions from the audience in an effort to unearth where the disagreement -- if any -- really lies.

Moderating the discussion will be Dave McCrory, SVP of Platform Engineering at Warner Music Group.

Bring your questions and opinions, and be ready to challenge and be challenged.

About Randy Bias

Randy has been a vocal advocate for open systems for more than two decades. He was the technical visionary at GoGrid and at CloudScale Networks. He led the open-licensing of GoGrid's APIs, which inspired Sun Microsystems, Rackspace Cloud, VMware and others to follow. In 2006, he founded Cloudscaling with Adam Waters and since then has led teams that designed, architected, built and deployed cloud infrastructure for more than two dozen clients globally.

In 2010, Randy became an early and vocal supporter of the OpenStack project, and led the teams that deployed the first public OpenStack storage cloud (Swift) outside of Rackspace, and the first public OpenStack compute cloud (Nova). He is a founding Board Member of the OpenStack Foundation.

Randy's full bio can be found here - http://cloudscaling.com/blog/author/randybias/

About Nati Shalom

Nati Shalom, Founder and CTO at GigaSpaces, is a thought leader in Cloud-Computing and Big-Data Technologies. Shalom was recently recognized as a Top Cloud Computing Blogger for CIO’s by The CIO Magazine and his blog listed as an excellent blog by technical founders by YCombinator. Shalom is the founder and also one of leaders of OpenStack-Israel group, and is a frequent presenter at industry conferences.

About Alex Freedland

Alex has over 20 years experience in the high tech industry. Previously, Alex co-founded RSI Group, Inc., one of the world’s principal providers of Receivables Management Software where he assumed the responsibility of EVP and CTO in charge of Product Development and Technical Services.

In 1999, RSI Group was acquired by LondonBridge Software, a leading UK Technology firm, now a part of Fair Isaac and Co. Alex’s previous experience includes a wide range of technical and management positions with Tektronix, IBM, ADP, Netscape, and KLA-Tencor.

He holds a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University in California.

About Dave McCory

Dave McCrory is the Senior Vice President of Engineering for Warner Music Group, where he is building a next generation enterprise PaaS. Dave has coined the term "Data Gravity", which he recognized through extensive research over the past several years. He has presented at many conferences, including Cloud Connect, Gluecon, Interop Big Data, VMworld US/Europe, RubyConf, and RailsConf. Dave is also co-author of the book titled "Advanced Server Virtualization", and holds 9 granted Patents. He also co-founded 2 startups, Surgient Inc. and Hyper9, where he was Chief Scientist/CTO.