OSCON logo It is a reasonable statement to make that most people don't enjoy moving.

Packing up all of your worldly possessions into boxes, loading them up into a truck, and then driving to a new abode where the process begins again in reverse does not exactly scream fun times. As painful as the process of moving can be, though, it is essentially a standard process. You can take your own stuff with you and arrange it however you see fit.

Imagine a world where each home was reliant on a certain type of furniture, or appliances. You can't take your favorite recliner with you, nor your grandmother's antique lamp, because it isn't compatible with the next living space. That is, essentially, analogous to the problem of committing your IT resources to an infrastructure that isn't open. Once your apps and data are inside such a system, they are pretty much stuck there, unless you want to go through some serious pain.

This is one of the much-touted benefits of the open cloud: the capability to shift your data in and out of an open cloud system is relatively trivial compared to trying to extricate that same data from a proprietary system. Relatively is key--let's face it, moving to any new infrastructure isn't happy-happy fun times. But better the usual hassle of moving than to belatedly discover your stuff is stuck.

Open cloud is a very real concept in IT today, and it's not something only getting pushed by Red Hat. That would be too obvious. Big-name players like IBM, Intel, and Booz Allen Hamilton are all making serious moves in this space, because they understand customers want data portability--along with legacy infrastructure compatibility, maximum configurability, and the capability to manage their own IT destinies.

This is why these four IT leaders are sponsoring what has become a fixture at O'Reilly's OSCON event: Open Cloud Day. Held on Tuesday, July 21, Open Cloud will once again feature industry leaders from these companies, as well as NGINX, Rackspace, Bitergia, Internap, Midokura, Mesophere, and Atigeo.

The agenda for this all-day event will feature topics ranging from cloud security to metrics to containers--and nearly everything else an IT manager needs to know about the latest and greatest technologies at the disposal of open cloud computing today. It's well worth getting to OSCON early in the week and connecting with some of the leading experts in cloud computing. Open Cloud Day is open to any OSCON registrant.

Your IT--infrastructure, applications, and data--belongs to you. That's the promise of open cloud. Stop by Open Cloud Day and learn more.


About the author

Brian Proffitt is Senior Manager, Community Outreach within Red Hat's Open Source Program Office, focusing on enablement, community metrics and foundation and trade organization relationships. Brian's experience with community management includes knowledge of community onboarding, community health and business alignment. Prior to joining Red Hat in 2013, he was a technology journalist with a focus on Linux and open source, and the author of 22 consumer technology books.

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