Cloud Operations Is the New Killer Job

Alistair is the founder of Bitcurrent, a research firm focused on emerging technologies. He’s founded a variety of startups, and technology accelerators, including Year One Labs, CloudOps, Rednod, Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and Networkshop. He’s a frequent speaker and writer on subjects such as entrepreneurship, cloud computing, Big Data, Internet performance and web technology, and has helped launch a number of major conferences on these topics.

Alistair has co-authored three books on Internet technology, including Web Operations (2010, O’Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O’Reilly), and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall). A product manager by trade, he’s also an advisor to a number of venture firms and the founder of the Bitnorth conference.

Most of what he says winds up on his blog, solveforinteresting.com, or on Twitter (@acroll).

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Mr. Black is the co-founder of Boundary and a recognized expert in large-scale technology infrastructure design, implementation,and operation. Previously, he was an engineering director in the ECN group at Microsoft Windows Live, where he helped build one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. As the manager of website engineering at Amazon, he lead the design and implementation of a new, layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. As principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure, he co-authored the first documents on what later became EC2. As senior manager for information security, he owned and successfully delivered Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI DSS compliance for Amazon infrastructure, including the critical payments processing systems. His work in the Internap R&D team resulted in his being awarded 3 patents in Internet routing and traffic optimization. Mr. Black is also co-author on several IETF RFCs on MPLS control protocols and IPv6 network operations.

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Lew Moorman is instrumental in driving strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives for Rackspace. He joined the company in April of 2000 and has served a variety of strategy and marketing roles throughout the company’s growth. Before joining Rackspace, Moorman held several positions at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, advising high technology clients on critical strategic issues.

As Rackspace Hosting’s Chief Strategy Officer, Lew Moorman drives strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives across the company. He also serves as President of Rackspace’s Cloud business, leading the company’s fastest growing business unit. He speaks frequently at industry events on cloud computing, hosting and the rapidly evolving world of IT.

Moorman received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

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Kevin Gibbs is the technical lead and manager of the Google App Engine project. Kevin joined Google in 2004. Prior to his work on Google App Engine, Kevin worked for a number of years in Google’s systems infrastructure group, where he worked on the cluster management systems that underly Google’s products and services. Kevin is also the creator of Google Suggest, the product which provides interactive search suggestions as you type on the Google homepage. Prior to joining Google, Kevin worked with the Advanced Internet Technology group at IBM, where he focused on developer tools.

Kevin holds an M.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) with Distinction in Research from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Computer Science with Distinction from Stanford.

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