It’s been a quiet few months on this blog while we worked on our backend technology. More on that later; there’s more exciting news:
Our next event is on Scaling PHP in the Cloud.
Most apps are designed around single server deployments. One VPS with one WordPress or Drupal install, or maybe something you built with CodeIgniter. Scaling up from there to a multi-server deployment is often a challenge. You have to think in entirely new ways, from cache invalidation to database sharding to deploying the same code on multiple servers.
Scaling PHP in the Cloud is a one day conference on tackling these challenges. The event is on July 9, 2011, in Bangalore. Registrations and the call for sponsors will open later this week, but the call for speakers is now open.
To submit, head to http://funnel.hasgeek.com/phpcloud/
The event has a Barcamp-inspired format. Anyone can propose to speak, or can propose a topic and request someone else to speak. We found a venue that can take over 400 people. To help bring some order for that large a gathering, we’re taking submissions in advance, with public voting. The selection team (currently Aditya Sengupta, @aditseng, and Nigel Babu, @nigelbabu, but you can also join) will draw up a tentative schedule from the most popular proposals. We will publish this schedule as a guide to the event, to help participants plan their day, but will have many open slots for anyone else to step up and speak.
The venue has three halls and we’ll have three parallel tracks to group sessions under:
- Development – On writing software for distributed environments
- Deployment – On managing all those servers and services in the cloud
- Business – On how any of this makes business sense
Lectures, demos, workshops, case studies — they’re all welcome. Tell us how to use some tool, how to architect code for the cloud, or how your company manages its servers and why you’re a great place to work at (wink!).
At the end of the day, we’d like everyone to go home not with some fuzzy notion of why something is good, but a solid sense of what they should do next. This is an event for hands-on geeks.
Your sessions don’t necessarily have to be about PHP. This is an event on scaling in the cloud, and with PHP being as popular as it is, we use that as the reference point: sessions have to make sense to someone working with PHP. Your session could be about deploying with Fabric or legal jurisdictions for cloud hosting, not involving PHP at all, but still relevant to a PHP developer.
The event has a nominal registration fee to cover expenses, but speakers who make the selection team’s cut get a free pass (we’ll refund your ticket if you bought one already).
Head over to http://funnel.hasgeek.com/phpcloud/ and submit a proposal, or vote on the current submissions. We’ll add support for comments in another day — you can then ask proposers to clarify their proposals as needed.
Like everything we do at HasGeek, the Funnel is an open source app. You can contribute to the code, use our website for your own community events (just ask us to add an event) or fork the code and install your own instance. We’re coding furiously behind the scenes even as you read this. Expect new features to appear every day over the next few days. The code: https://github.com/hasgeek/funnel
Our next event is 
