Red Pill and Blue Pill: Virtual Machines and Virtual Environments

Virtualization has been a term that is bandied about regularly. What does it mean? More importantly, how can I get started experimenting with this for free?

This talk will first review many concepts of virtualization to build a solid foundation (virtual environments, virtual machines, para-virtualization, etc.). Then, we explore how python fits into this virtual world now and in the future.

We will walk the audience through building a free Amazon Web Service EC2 instance, explore Python/Boto, explore virtualenv, and explore other areas where python is to virtualize.

This topic is a very large topic so we will explore breadth first and then go deep on only a few subjects:

• For virtual environments: virtualenv

• For virtual machines: EC2 build

Speaker Bio: Glen Jarvis is a big fan of Python and its community. He has been coding Python professionally as a back-end engineer for over four years and has in the industry for over ten. He believes passionately in Python education and building talented teams: "Talented programmers are attracted to teams with other talented programmers." He also works for a virtualization company that uses python for building Xen, KVM and other virtual environments.