The week includes:

• The Enterprise Cloud Summit, a 2-day paid workshop on how enterprises can use cloud computing.
• The Interop General Conference, which includes a Cloud Computing and a SaaS track–the latter being run by Jeff Kaplan and Scott and Chris at Tripletree.
• A CloudCamp event that Interop and Bitcurrent are sponsoring which will bring in Dave Nielsen and some of the other CloudCamp creators.
• An Unconference event open to all attendees, which has become an Interop tradition.

If you want to attend Interop, we’ve got a $100 discount code for the general conference. Expo passes, which will get you into CloudCamp and Unconference too, are free.

At Interop this year, we’re helping to run the Software-as-a-Service track (in conjunction with Jeff Kaplan of Thinkstrategies) and the Cloud Computing track (helped by Peter Laird, who I first met when I saw his excellent Taxonomy of the Cloud, which he’s been hard at work revising for Interop.) I’m also doing a free session on cloud foundations at the show. The lineup of speakers and panelists is remarkable, and will hopefully lead to some great conversations. We also have folks from Google, Amazon, Joyent, 10Gen and Bungee on a Web2Expo panel.

Here’s a recap of the sessions and participants:

• SaaS Best Practices and Pitfalls is a reprise of a session I taught in Vegas, and it’s available here. All the content we produce at these events is in the Content section of the site, by the way.
• Martin Dubois of Taleo is taking time from his crazy schedule to present on compliance and regulation in SaaS — a hot topic, and Martin is a double threat with his background in law and technology.
• SMB SaaS, where Jeff has a lineup of some of the best small-business-focussed application developers out there: Alastair Mitchell of Huddle.net, Bill Lucchini of Intuit Quickbase, George Symons of Yosemite Technologies, Mike McDerment of Freshbooks, and Stephen Cho of Google Apps.
• A panel on managing SaaS with folks from Aria Systems, Boomi, and Conformity.
• A look at companies that have merged traditional products with a SaaS element to differentiate themselves, including Tomtom, Alertlogic, and Napera.
• Adam Gross of Salesforce.com on building applications on a Platform-as-a-Service offering (we’re guessing he’ll use Saleforce’s APEX as an example.)
• Peter Laird presenting the aforementioned cloud taxonomy (pictured above.)
• A session on cloud SLAs with Gomez and Servicecloud. SLAs are a particularly hot topic for the enterprise-heavy Interop crowd.
• Intuit, Rackspace, and AWS talking about the secrets of running big clouds.
• A chat with Stacksafe, 3Tera, Rightscale and Elastra on “the big migration” from enterprise data centers into the cloud. I’m moderating this one and really looking forward to the discussion.
• A session on managing cloud applications. This panel includes Embotics, Splunk, and Fortisphere. Originally, ManageIQ and Bluelane were scheduled on this panel as well, but both dropped out at the last minute — one with a good reason — and Reuven Cohen of Enomalism is going to join us to fill out the group.
• A look at the Web2-centric clouds with Joyent, Google, Bungee, Amazon, and 10Gen.

If you’re at either event, say hi. And if you’re free Thursday night, consider joining us at Unconference.

The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. It’s available from the Briefings website at an affordable $250 through Paypal. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.

We’ve got many of these planned — my next one will be on Application Delivery Networks, and we’re also doing one on mobility and telepresence.

In May’s Interop Unconference, we explored their intersection in an informal jam session with enthusiastic audience participation starring Jinesh Varia (Amazon), Kirill Sheynkman (Elastra), Rueven Cohen (Enomaly), Jacob Farmer (Cambridge Computer), and Louis DiMeglio (ScienceLogic).

It’s taken some time to fully digest the results.

To many of us, the cloud is that amorphous blob of semicircular squiggles the IT crowd has been using on whiteboards to represent the internet since the mid-nineties. Clouds mean we don’t care what’s in them.

Once upon a time, that cloud in the middle of the whiteboard used to just represent the network — how to get from here to there. All the interesting stuff happened outside its borders. More recently, however, we’ve started moving the rest of the shapes on the whiteboard into the cloud. Applications and infrastructure are now drawn within the borders of that formerly ill-defined and anarchic etherspace.

If you listen to some overzealous cloudnuts, you’ll will hear that pretty much everything is rushing headlong into the Internet’s troposphere. But the truth is much more complex, and rational opinions seem to favor a hybrid future of rich clients, hardware, and software. We’ll have a hugely diverse mix of private and public cloud-based services providing both a back-end and a matrix for device interaction.

Aside: I’ll leave defining cloud computing ad nauseam to other bloggers. For our purpose it is the trend of outsourcing what you would normally run in your datacenter to an indefinitely flexible computing platform which is billed to you as a utility. Traditional hosters don’t count (for me) as cloud providers, but newer managed service hosters might, depending on the level of automation and scalability they employ.

So what did the Interop crowd conclude?

Since most of Interop’s attendees are IT infrastructure folks with a stake in the game, we had a lot to discuss:

How will clouds affect our jobs?

Will the computer networking industry as we know it come to an end?

One camp suspected that clouds will commoditize IT, leaving just a few elite engineers and operators jobs. These survivors might work in radically centralized data centers owned by a handful of “last clouds standing,” with a skeleton crew manning the transit providers.

On the other hand, it’s possible that a wide range of IT requirements and market competition will foster a variety of specialized and geographically localized clouds. This might come from compliance requirements (e-commerce or health), leaving many enterprises continuing to roll their own due to political, performance or security considerations.

Will the clouds start making their own gear?

Will cloud companies start to purchase infrastructure vendors as those complex products become increasingly strategic differentiators? Google has already been rumored to have developed their own 10GBit ethernet switch, presumably a crucial component in scaling their massively parallel architecture.

Will the cloud be good enough for mission-critical enterprise apps?

Amazon Web Services are evolving rapidly, introducing new features such as persistent storage, geographic localization, and even AWS SLAs. Will this be sufficient for most enterprises to begin running mission critical, sensitive applications in the cloud? Probably not.

AWS seems to be mainly popular for SaaS builders and web based startups. Large enterprise is testing the waters carefully — or most likely without realizing. There are lots of skunkworks projects running out there because IT was unable to deliver services for a last-minute project.

Other popular uses are SMB backups, prototyping, QA, and spillover resources.

In contrast to AWS, Google’s Appengine lets web software developers run their own SaaS applications on Google’s highly scalable platform.  Google has lowered the barrier to getting code out there by offering it for free up to 500 MB of storage and 5 million pageviews per month. Currently only suitable for Python shops, they plan on releasing support for more programming languages and frameworks.

What about SaaS and the cloud?

On the SaaS side of the cloud, Google Health is encouraging you to upload, organize and share your highly sensitive personal health information. I can’t imagine adoption has been rapid. At least Google Health defaults to SSL, a first for a Google application I believe (GMAIL still requires you to explicitly type https to maintain a secure session).

Even if you trust SSL, the security of such a system is questionable since it shares authentication with all your other Google services and could consitute a big privacy risk in association with data from all your other services.

Don’t lose perspective

There are more questions than answers about securing, optimizing, and monitoring the cloud. Will it be more cost effective? Is it worth redeveloping my software for the cloud? Will I be able to ensure adequate uptime? Are there geopolitical considerations in working with cloud networks?

In theory, eventually there should be a cloud architecture that will address everyone’s requirements. But it may be a long time before that level of security, reliability and trust develops. You might trust the cloud today, but there’s a good chance your trust isn’t justified. Call it a partly cloudy forecast.

It appears that Unconference in general was a big success at Interop. The Web Operations track was definitely interesting and included a bunch of probing discussions around our topics.

Some highlights:

During the Maximizing Web Performance session, we had good discussions around what web performance really is, how we can accelerate it, and what some of the realities of deployment are. Kent Alstad from Strangeloop Networks brought up the web performance equation which is a good way of examining all the components that go into end user performance in a web application.

One interesting point here was how the “client compute time” has become increasingly important with new web2.0 apps that have actual client processing (javascript, etc). That’s probably a component that we didn’t really take into account a few years ago.

In the Beyond Web1.0 discussion, Brian Albers from Kaazing gave us a good overview of what new technologies like Ajax and Comet were going to mean to the network and how some of the protocol behaviors that we’ve taken for granted for the last few years (particularly with HTTP) are different when it comes to these cutting edge technologies.

We had an interesting discussion about HTML5 and how even HTML is getting into the networking side of things with new directives that control TCP connection behavior. To me, this is a step in the right direction of having applications deal better with the network. This sort of stuff make me happy and it’s good to see that developers want to work together with the underlying network they write apps for.

During the Watch It Live discussion, John Overton from Coradiant helped us see the different ways that we can actually measure web performance. This was a very interesting discussion as we first had to separate monitoring availability (i.e. “are my pages available and working?”) from monitoring performance (i.e. “how fast is my application being delivered to my users”).

We discussed synthetic testing and real-time user monitoring and it became apparent that the world of monitoring may have room for both, depending on what an administrator is really looking for. We also talked about how the same client side compute time that Kent had brought up earlier was now something the monitoring vendors were tackling by injecting javascript into pages that actually measure browser render time, among other things.

Our last session was on public web services, led by Ajay Arora from Mashery. I thought this was a fascinating discussion on some of the new trends towards cloud computing and <some cool thing>-as-a-service model. Companies are offering hosting and outsourcing services that are actually run on virtualized computing platforms like Amazon’s EC2 – so, that’s like outsourcing on top of outsourcing. It was an interesting look into the new possibilities of services that these approaches are enabling us to realize; where we let people who are good something do that thing for us, so we can stick to what we know best.

I think the most important question that we tackled here was where we draw the line and how much of our applications can we really send into the almighty cloud. Of course, we didn’t reach an answer, and the generic it-varies-by-application answer came up quite a bit. But, I wasn’t really expecting us to get to the bottom of this one just yet. Considering how we’re at the very beginning of these trends, I think we have a bit to go to actually figure out what goes into the cloud and what goes into that rack we bought from ebay that’s now in our basements!

A great event all around. Obviously we didn’t have enough time to discuss everything that has to do with web operations, but we did pretty well in bringing up some key issues and hopefully leaving our attendees with good questions to go answer-hunting for. I’d like to thank our experts and all those who attended despite the loud party next door that made us all yell at each other to be heard! And, of course, thanks to Interop and Alistair for putting together such a cool event. There was beer, you know!

• Kent Alstad, CTO of Strangeloop Networks will be our expert in the Maximizing Web Performance session.
• Ajay Arora, VP Products at Mashery will be our expert in the Public Web Services session.

I’m very happy to have Kent and Ajay in our little Web Operations family. I’m looking forward to having great discussions with both of them during the track.

• John Overton, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Coradiant, will be our expert for the Watch It Live session.
• Brian Albers, VP of Development at Kaazing, will be our expert for the Beyond Web 1.0 session.

It’s great to have John and Brian involved with the event. I’m looking forward to working with both of them.

I’m the moderator for the Web Operations topic, which includes everything from web application deployment to delivery to security to acceleration to monitoring, and beyond!

Making sense of these technologies and how they help us deliver an application is difficult enough. However, we also have to be aware of where new technologies are headed and how concepts that we think we’re familiar with may change and alter the way we think of web applications.

In these sessions, we’ll examine some of these technologies and how they apply to today’s and tomorrow’s web applications. Our experts will provide a sampling of what’s important and relevant when we deal with web operations. Collectively, we’ll discuss, debate, scrutinize, and fawn over a large variety of technologies. Our intent is to leave the session smarter and dumber at the same time: we’ll learn about some things that we didn’t know, but also realize how much we need to learn yet. Web operations is a technology sandwich, with extra toppings – we have 2 hours to take a small bite.

Since 1999, we’ve been organizing conferences for Interop: First on performance, following the publication of a book on the subject; then on web operations, data centers, and so on. This year, we’re running the SaaS and Cloud Computing track, and we’ve got a lineup of experts and panelists.

But even though that conference track has folks from Google, Amazon, Akamai, and a host of startups participating, it’s Unconference that keeps us up at night.

Years ago, Lenny Heymann, the guy behind Interop, sat down to talk about the future of shows. Over glasses of wine, he worried that traditional one-way presentations weren’t engaging enough.

Recent years have proven him right: Today, we have Barcamp, Blitzweekend, Startupcamp, Powerpoint Karaoke, and other spins on conferences. We go to events and log in to liveblog the sessions, only paying cursory attention to the presenter.

The two-hour long, beer-fueled Unconference has four topics, each of which covers a subject in a half hour. There’s a whiteboard, projector, and moderator for each, and not much else. The goal is to provide just enough structure to get a dialog going.

Stay tuned for more on Unconference as we launch the concept. It’s going to become a regular part of Interop’s schedule, and we hope to see the Bitcurrent regulars voicing strong opinions as usual.