I have been following this event every year for the last decade (I still remember the very first event where it was called Bang!Linux). I managed to present at foss.in in 2002 and 2003 (It was called Linux Bangalore at that point). Since then this event has become a phenomenon and raises the bar year on year! Kudos to Atul Chitnis (@achitnis) and his team for turning this into a cult.
My first experience of foss.in was through a talk on Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure in 2002 along with my colleague, Tarun Anand. To be honest, The very thought of presenting .NET to a set of hardcore OSS geeks made me pretty nervous.
I also managed to convince the event team to include my talk on Microsoft Windows & Linux – Side by Side in 2003. I still remember this session as one of my best sessions as all the demos worked like a charm and the audience connected with me very well!
The talk that I submitted in 2004 was rejected by the team as they felt it was indirectly pitching and marketing Microsoft products. Though I tried convincing them, to my disappointment, the talk didn’t make it to the final list.
After a long gap of 6 years, I was thrilled to see my talk getting shortlisted for this year. Few things changed from 2003. I don’t work for Microsoft anymore and I turned into a neutral technology evangelist focusing on a broad spectrum of technologies including OSS. The crux of the session is how the tux on the Cloud delivers value.
Because of my hectic schedule at work, I couldn’t make it to the event for the first 4 days. I managed to reach the venue at 11AM on Saturday and attended 2 sessions on CPU hard limits and Incremental Development. Lunch needs a special mention. The food was refreshingly different and tasted very good. This was catered by the rural restaurant, Hallimane which specializes in authentic Karnataka cuisine. My session started at 2PM and the hall was almost 70% full. I realized that most of the audiences had a good understanding of Virtualization and Hypervisors. I spent few minutes establishing the concepts of Cloud Computing and then started to map OSS contributions at every layer. I briefly touched upon the OSS Hypervisors like XEN and KVM, setting up the LAMP based apps on Amazon EC2 and Hadoop case study of The NewYork Times. I did an end to end demo of launching and customizing a LAMP AMI on Amazon EC2. I had interesting questions from the audience on Hypervisors, load balancing on Cloud, Web Hosting vs. Cloud and security on Cloud. This talk is based on my article that I have written sometime back. You can download the slide deck from the Talks section of my website.
My Session
I spent a lot of time answering and interacting with the participants after my session. I also got the opportunity to meet Tinu Cherian (@tinucherian) and Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) in person and we discussed few community related initiatives.
When I went to meet Atul Chitnis, he was sitting in the middle of tangled CAT-5 cables and a bunch of Macs in the Network Operation Center. It was also amusing to see like minded developers huddling to hack Linux Kernel.
The Network Operations Center
Hacker Session
I missed the evening party due to some personal commitment. I was following the Twitter stream and looked like the party rocked!
Having been a part of many technology conferences as an organizer and as a speaker, I very clearly understand what it takes to deliver an event of this scale. FOSS.IN stands out for just one thing – It is driven out of genuine passion for sharing and spreading the knowledge. This element is visible everywhere and starts right at the registration desk. Every volunteer / speaker is sincere, passionate and tried to add value to the event. It set an example of how a technology conference can be run by the community. I feel proud to be a part of foss.in and look forward to contribute to it in the coming years!
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
