It's hard to believe it's over already, but Structure 2015 is a wrap. Over 600 people packed into the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco over two days of great discussions and talks from some of the leading minds in the cloud world.
These were just a few of the highlights:
THE GUY WHO PUSHED NETFLIX INTO THE FUTURE SAYS WE'RE STILL UNDERESTIMATING AMAZON Adrian Cockcroft's "state of the cloud" presentations are always a highlight of Structure, and this year was no exception. While the best part was probably the IT-companies-as-battleships metaphor,
Business Insider sums up several other predictions and observations from his talk.
HOW COREOS TOOK GOOGLE-STYLE INFRASTRUCTURE TO NEW HEIGHTS Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, made his Structure debut this year alongside Eric Brewer of Google to talk about container management and the future of app development.
SiliconAngle caught up with him on the sidelines for a wide-ranging interview on this very interesting startup.
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WANTS IN ON THE PUBLIC CLOUD, BUT NEEDS MORE TRANSPARENCY If you needed any proof that the public cloud is practically mainstream, even the most security conscious parts of the federal government are eyeing these services. Arlette Hart, chief information security officer of the FBI (below right, with Barb Darrow of Fortune), likes much of what public cloud services have to offer but is quite concerned about the "trust me" approach to security often employed by those companies,
as IDG News Service reports.
INTEL WILL SHIP FIRST XEON CHIPS WITH INTEGRATED FPGAS IN Q1 2016 First announced at Structure 2014, Intel's programmable Xeon chips are slowly winding their way to market but will arrive next year, Diane Bryant told Structure attendees first thing Wednesday morning. Amazon Web Services and longtime Intel buddy Microsoft are likely the first two customers,
according to Venturebeat.
INSTAGRAM IS EYEING VIRTUAL REALITY TO LET USERS TELEPORT AROUND THE WORLD One nice thing about having a parent company like Facebook is that it allows you to think quite differently about the distribution of your app compared to just about anybody else. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger said Thursday that collaboration between his group and the Facebook-owned Oculus team could allow Instagram users to unlock some amazing virtual reality experiences,
as Variety noted.
GOOGLE'S HÖLZLE ENVISIONS CLOUD BUSINESS ECLIPSING ADS IN 2020 As AWS continues its amazing growth and emerges as a more compelling business than Amazon's web store, Google's Urs Hölzle thinks his company might go through a similar transition. He reiterated a goal to have cloud revenue at Google outpace ad revenue by the end of the decade,
as reported Wednesday by Bloomberg, but a lot is going to have to change at Google in order for that to happen. (More on that in a minute.)
INVESTOR KHOSLA SAYS DELL-EMC MERGER WILL "SET BACK INNOVATION," PARTNERS UNMOVED Vinod Khosla's trademark bomb-throwing style made its return to the Structure stage this year, and his target was the legacy IT companies that his startups are hoping to take down. When asked about the proposed Dell-EMC merger, Kholsa said he believes the deal will actually retard innovation at the merged company,
according to CRN. (Bonus points to CRN for a snarky follow-up line from a partner of Dell and EMC: "Didn't Sun (which Khosla co-founded) fail?"
After a whirlwind few days in San Francisco, it's nice to catch a breath. But seeing the Structure crowd back together and passionately debating the direction of this still fast-growing industry was a wonderful experience, and only the first of many such experiences that all of us at Structure want to continue to provide over the coming years.
