My Picks for OSCON 2008

Yay! I will be in OSCON 2008. Along with the growth of the open source ecosystem, OSCON has also grown up to the diversities of multitude of technologies. And this year, they are celebrating the tenth anniversary of promoting open source.

I will be in Portland from 21st till 25th of July as a part of this celebration. I will be attending 4 tutorials and a number of regular sessions. Each of them will be great inductions to some of the newer technologies that I have been planning for quite some time to get into. However, I will be focusing on 2 primary areas as my main takeaways from this conference ..

Scaling out with large datasets

Indoctrinated in the basics of relational databases, normalization and joins, I find that almost all of the Web 2.0 scalability stories are taking alternate routes. Have a look at Google BigTable, Amazon SimpleDB and Facebook Cassandra - all of them have got around the scalability problems of normalized relational databases through denormalization and usage based data models, replication among multiple nodes and delayed eventual consistency. Processing large tables with SQL based queries are being replaced by map-reduce jobs that operate on tuple models and enforce data integrity through code rather than database constraints.

OSCON 2008 has a number of sessions that deal with this topic of scalability in the cloud ..

1. Cloud Computing with bigdata


2. CouchDB from 10,000 ft


3. Processing Large Data with Hadoop and EC2


4. HDFS Under the Hood


5. Cloud Computing with Persistent Data: Pushing the Envelope of Amazon Web Services


6. Scale into the Cloud with Open Source

Asynchronous Messaging as the enabler of enterprise architectures

Today's common wisdom is that asynchronous messaging enables loose coupling in distributed architectures. And this has led to the recent popularity of the actor model of programming which relies on message-send and receive as the basic constructs of the programming model. Erlang has been encouraging this model for years, though only recently has started getting the mindshare and marketshare of the mainstream. Scala also offers great support for actor model of programming that makes your application scale so easily.

Along with the growing popularity of message queueing frameworks, we are looking at recent implementations of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP) that offer multiple messaging solutions to connect across distributed systems.

OSCON 2008 has multiple sessions and BOFs that discuss this paradigm at length ..

1. Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub


2. Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang


3. XMPP/Open Source Components for Cloud Services

And this is just the beginning of the fun. There will be a number of events, parties, fun and frolic centered around open source innovation. I am really excited to be a party to it.

See you all in Portland !