Know what’s right around the corner? Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 (May 11-12 in Santa Clara…you registered already, right?).
Next up in our series of Q&As with speakers you’ll see at the Summit is CloudCredo’s Colin Humphreys. Colin is a regular speaker on PaaS-related topics, and is a member of Cloud Foundry’s Community Advisory Board. You’ll see Colin on the stage throughout the conference, co-presenting a number of talks and participating in the Dr. Nic panel discussion on buildpacks and containers for Cloud Foundry.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career history
I’ve been a human version of Cloud Foundry – a mechanical deployment turk, if you will – for 15 years. “It works on my desktop!” was where my work began. My role has always been taking applications, testing them, deploying them, scaling them, and maintaining them – for large teams of developers.
How did you get involved in Cloud Foundry?
For many years I’ve been building PaaS-like systems for companies such as EBay, Volkswagen, Philips, Cineworld, and others – I just didn’t realise my systems were PaaSes. When I saw Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky presenting Cloud Foundry at the launch I decided to change the direction of my career. I created a Vagrant-based CF image and sent it to my clients that very day. I progressed to delivering the world’s first production Cloud Foundry and also (what I believe to be) the world’s largest multi-cloud Cloud Foundry installation. I’ve been running CloudCredo for two years; we help organisations deliver with Cloud Foundry and BOSH. We also love XP and Continuous Delivery.
What you are speaking about at CF Summit?
I’m giving three talks and I’m on a panel; it’s a busy couple of days. I’m talking about monitoring and logging with Ed King. He’s a rising star in the Cloud Foundry community. Marco Hochstrasser and I are talking about ‘Service Foundry’; we agree services are the Achilles’ heel of PaaS and are demanding the community collaborate to do something about it. James Bayer and I are talking about two exciting new projects and how they enable a new workflow for Cloud Foundry development; Cloud Rocker and Lattice.
Why do you think what your talk is about is important?
I think there’s two really exciting points to draw from my talks; firstly, Cloud Foundry is such an exciting area and innovation is only accelerating. Secondly, as demonstrated by the collaborative nature of the talks, Cloud Foundry is an ecosystem of organisations finding a shared direction through the common good of making application developers’ lives easier.
What do you hope people learn?
I hope people find something that inspires them when they return to their work after The Summit. I hope Cloud Foundry can make it easier for them to get their jobs done.
Register today for Cloud Foundry Summit 2015.
