CeBIT Australia 2015 Experience
This year was the first time I had attended CeBIT, with a primary motivator being the Cloud Conference component, with that component being of interest personally and professionally, as well as the fact that events of this size are rarely held in Perth. The speakers for the Cloud Conference covered private enterprise and government, giving a broad view of how cloud was making IT work better.
The first speaker was Chris C Kemp, former CTO at NASA and co-founder of OpenStack. He spoke about the concepts of anti-scarcity, where a thing can be made more valuable by making it more freely available and accessible because more parties are involved and invested in the item. This concept applies strongly with open source software and OpenStack in particular, which because as an internal project at NASA. By allowing it to be available to all, OpenStack now has support and investment from large IT vendors such as HP, IBM and Cisco.
David Boyle from NAB opened his presentation by stating he wouldn’t use the “c word” (cloud). He managed to stick with his promise, and talked about the concepts of traditional “horse and cart” IT, the model we’ve used in the past of physical infrastructure, lengthy release cycles and waterfall development. This was contrasted with “Ferrari” IT, which uses virtualisation, frequent release models, continuous deployment, automation and dev ops. A key concept he outlined was “fail fast” – having a deployment framework that can be run rapidly so success or failure can be determined quickly and subsequent deployments attempted once problems have been fixed.