By some sick twist of fate, Interop and VMworld are happening at the same time this week. That creates a real problem for those of us in the space where the application meets the network. Do we go to New York for Interop, which is conveniently next to the Web2Expo, or do we go to VMworld? Many companies, including Zeus Technology, split their executive teams, sending some to New York for stupidly expensive hotels and great food, and others to Las Vegas for slightly less expensive hotels and slightly inferior food, but better gambling. I ran into some of 3Tera’s execs at Accel’s reception at the Tao Opium Room, and they had the same problem.

Alistair made the call to go to Interop. I made the call to go to VMworld on my own nickel, since I have lots of friends in the virtualization business due to my time at Citrix, where I did strategic planning for their virtualization business pre-XenSource. Special thanks to Fortisphere for covering my show pass! I miss expense reports, or at least getting them paid.

But the real reason VMworld seemed a good idea is that, in addition to consulting, I’m working on a stealth mode cloud computing idea, and I guessed that VMworld would be the place for clouds. It sort of is, but not compared to Alistair’s cloud program at Interop. Sure, there is VMware’s Vclould announcement, and there are quite a few companies with the world “cloud” on their booth, and some real cloud companies like RightScale and SkyTap, but on Wednesday, there are more than 80 VMworld breakout sessions, and exactly one of them is about clouds specifically.

Why is this happening? It’s because VMware is focusing on virtualization in all its flavors, but the cloud computing guys see virtualization as only one of the enabling technologies that can make clouds work. So I guess it’s natural for the clouds to be attracted to Interop and Web2Expo more than VMworld.

It’s time to head to New York for the start of the fall conference season. This year, Interop and Web2Expo are side-by-side at the Javitz Center, and we’re holding the Interop Unconference event on Thursday night. Then there’s High Performance on Wall Street happening on Monday the 22nd.

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:
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The (apparently) slower pace of summer is giving way to a very hectic September, with Bitnorth, Unconference, Interop, and Web2Expo all happening in a two week period.

I’m moderating a panel on Scaling Web 2.0 applications by building in the clouds as part of the Performance and Scaling track. It’s a great lineup, with folks from Amazon, Bungee, Joyent and 10Gen.

Haven’t figured out all the questions yet, but it’s bound to be a good discussion with that many seasoned Web2 operators in one place. Bitcurrent has a $100 discount code for the conference: webny08mc23.

Web2Expo New York is happening in September. We’ll be moderating a panel on Big Cloud platforms.

From the session description:

Cloud computing is self-serve outsourcing for web companies. Clouds give even the smallest startup access to world-class infrastructure that can grow as needed. And developers build apps faster, because they start with the building blocks of online applications: Authentication, storage, messaging, and the social graph.

Can’t get into specifics on panelists yet, but they’re good; April’s session on databases of the future brought together senior folks from Microsoft, MySQL, and Amazon SimpleDB.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to moderate a panel on next-generation databases at Web2Expo. Having database greats Brian Aker, Dave Campbell, and Matt Domo in one place made for great dialogue. In addition to finding out whether RDBMS is dead, we looked at the big challenges of data storage (synchronization, working offline, and a shift towards specialized data models.)

We even found out how these three datascenti track their contacts (MySQL’s Aker uses scripts he wrote; Microsoft’s Campbell uses Outlook.)

Then last week at Interop, I had folks from platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Opsource together with a number of startups and virtualization tool makers. Again, great dialogue, even on the five-person panel that ran over. This time, the consensus seemed to be that on-demand computing was great for bursty capacity and highly parallel tasks, but lacked the controls, management tools, and SLAs to be a production platform for enterprises at the moment.

But Structure promises to be the most compressed discussion yet. Om Malik, the guy behind the event, says it’s about two things: Learning how the new web is built from the architects that built it; and networking with investors who “are looking to place their bets on cloud computing” and see it as a huge opportunity. “Structure 08 is about Getting Web Done,” says Malik.
I have two panels on the same day to moderate:

• Cloud Computing: Infrastructure for Entrepreneurs, featuring Geva Perry, CMO of GigaSpaces; Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre; Lew Moorman, SVP Strategy of Rackspace; Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer at Google; and Joseph Weinman, corporate development and strategy at AT&T.
• Scaling to Satiate Demand: Tactics from the pioneers, with Sandy Jen, co-founder and VP Engineering of Meebo; Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5, Jeremiah Robinson, CTO of Slide; and Jonathan Heiliger, VP Technical Operations of Facebook.

Each of these will be a fast-and-furious fifty-minute discussion around on-demand computing and the ability to scale. Time to come up with some pithy questions and awkward follow-ups.

Any sugggestions?

Random($foo) has compiled a list of links to most of the Web2Expo presentations, many of which are either in hosted slideshow or recorded video format.

At O’Reilly’s conference on emerging web technologies in San Francisco last week, several of the hit topics from last year’s conference have become full-blown tracks this time around, reflecting how quickly a niche topic like the Facebook Query Language or the mobile web become mainstream.

Another key trend is the move away from traditional web-based interfaces to alternate ways of interacting with applications, from SMS or instant messenger to e-mail. Brady Forrest, co-chair of the event for O’Reilly Media, also listed personal analytics as a growing theme at the conference, citing applications like Socialistics that provide “lots of info porn on your network.”

While much of the event’s content revolves around the practice of running sites, there are a growing number of sessions on how to manage user communities, design interfaces, develop SEO-friendly applications, and include gameplay in sites. “We’ve done a really good job of making this a place where people can learn from those who are defining the future of the web,” said Forrest.

It’s a reflection that the job of web operations, which used to involve hardware, is now as much about managing analytics, communities, content, and legality.

I’m not a huge fan of security and everything that is associated with it. That’s not because I don’t think it’s important; I actually think it’s critical in both networking and application development. But, rather, it’s just not my thing and I’ve usually been in technology areas where security is important, but somewhat peripheral.

That being said, I attended a couple of sessions at Web2Expo today where security issues were a takeaway in both.

First, Jacob West (who’s written a book on security) gave an interesting talk on the “Dark Side of Ajax.” It’s not news that Ajax has some significant security holes that have been exposed already and are somewhat well known. Some examples:

• Cross-site scripting lets malicious users insert bad javascript code into the content of a website and harm future visitors (the famous Myspace worm exploited this).
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is nasty and exploits websites that need user authentication (among other things)
• And a new one called javascript hijacking that Jacob has actually written a paper on.

I’ve seen similar presentations at other Ajax/web2.0 events and it’s interesting to me how it’s a lot of talk about how there are problems and very little about what’s being done about them. Mr. West did talk about how some popular Ajax frameworks are addressing the javascript hijacking issue, which is great. But, what happens with the next vulnerability, and the one after that?

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Web2Expo San Francisco is coming up. The conference has grown quickly; initially, as a reaction to the popularity of O’Reilly’s more blue-sky conference, Web2.0 (which is now called Web2Summit.) Following the success of Web2Summit — the organizers sold out their 2,000 registrations quickly and had to turn away thousands more — they launched the Expo.

Web2Expo isn’t just a spill-over conference; it’s now got an identity of its own. If the folks at Web2Summit speculate and scheme, then it’s left to the Web2Expo attendees to figure out how to build what their less grounded peers have already promised.

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