EXO Leaders Cloud Summit

Held at the Aspen Meadows Resort, home of the Aspen Institute, the EXO Leaders Cloud Summit was a thought-provoking and visionary meeting of cross-industry cloud computing professionals. (Although not a DC Tech event, which are the usual topics for my blog posts, my connections in DC helped me find out about this and enabled me to attend.)

We discussed the future of cloud computing, present challenges, and leading in this exciting and challenging environment. I was thrilled to attend! It was a small enough group that we had time to get to know each other and explore each other's challenges and opportunities.

Attended by industry giants, such as Google, Microsoft and Netflix, as well as numerous small and large cloud computing companies, I enjoyed the free-form creation of the agenda by the group and the presentations and case studies brought out by the attendees. We discussed a wide variety of topics from user adoption and dealing with difficult deployments, to developing and growing an industry-wide standard for continuous software release. It was heavily attended by advocates of Spinnaker.io. This open-source product was developed by Netflix and is poised to be adopted industry-wide in the near future. It's exciting to see its capabilities and how it will aid in consistently, rapidly and confidently deploying artifacts to the cloud. It stands to be a real game changer for the industry.

I left with great advice and actionable steps to improve our transition to the cloud in my organization, ideas for improving our tactical execution and strategic vision, as well a group of wonderful new colleagues.

Hats off to Pete Erickson and his team at Modev for organizing this meeting of minds!