I am a frequent presenter at industry events where I frequently speak about open source, systems management and cloud computing. I tend to speak mostly about the intersection of open source cloud computing and software development.

Speaking Engagements

Here are a few of my speaking engagements past and upcoming.

• OSCON 2013, The Hitchiker’s Guide to Open Source Cloud Computing
• Linux Foundation End-User Summit 2013 (Keynote) - Open Cloud in the Enterprise – Alan Clark, SUSE; Paul Holland, HP; Mark Hinkle, Citrix; Sean Dague, IBM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2013, Hitchiker’s Guide to Cloud Computing
• ApacheCon North America 2013 (Keynote)  - Apache in Business - Phil Robb of Hewlett-Packard, Bertrand Delacretaz of Adobe
• Cloud Connect Silicon Valley 2013 (Workshop), Advanced Private Cloud – Automation, Self-Service and Cloud Management
• Cloud Connect Silicon Valley 2013(Keynote)- Are Clouds the Gateway Drug to a Quantified Society?, With Ann Winbald, Hummer Winbald Ventures, Ian Rae, CEO CloudOps, Ashesh Badani, GM, Cloud Business Unit, RedHat
• Southern California Linux Expo 11x, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cloud, (presentation)
• Build a Cloud Day San Francisco, Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing(presentation)
• Open Cloud Conf 2012, It Takes an Open Source Village to Build a Cloud (presentation)
• LinuxFest NW 2012, Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Comptuing (presentation)
• Cloud Computing Expo West 2011, Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing (presentation)
• LinuxCon Europe  2011, Building Open Source Cloud Computing Environments (presentations)
• Cloud Computing Expo East 2011, Introduction to Open Source Cloud Computing
• Citrix Webinar, Delivering IaaS with Open Source Software (presentation)
• Scale 9x, Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing (presentation)
• Linuxcon 2010, Open Source Toolchains for Managing Clouds, (presentation)
• OSCON 2010, Three Considerations to Prevent Cloud Lock-In
• OSCON 2010, Open Source Tool Chain for Cloud Computing, (presentation)

Speaker Bio

Depending on the venue I use multiple biographies applicable to the audience.

Serious Biography

Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions  at Citrix Systems Inc. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix open source efforts around the open source cloud computing platform, Apache CloudStack and the Xen Hypervisor. Previously he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 100,000 users and 20,000 organizations on all seven continents. He also is a longtime open source expert and author having served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. Mr. Hinkle is also the author of the book, “Windows to Linux Business Desktop Migration.” (Thomson, 2006). He is a contributor to NetworkWorld’s Open Source Subnet and his personal blog on open source, technology, and new media can be found at www.socializedsoftware.com. You can follow him on twitter @mrhinkle.

Fun Biography

Once upon a time, a lot longer ago then he wished Mark Hinkle was born in a small Pennsylvania town and through the most unlikely sequence of events ended up as a technologist involved in the development and evangelism of free and open source software.  Mark has written extensively on open source as the former editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld Magazine and for numerous other publications (Network World, Forbes, Linux.com). He currently is the Senior Director, Cloud Computing at Citrix Systems where he helps support the Apache CloudStack and Xen.org projects. You can find his blog at www.socializedsoftware.com and you can follow him on Twitter @mrhinkle.

Speaking Abstracts

Here are the abstracts from some of my past speaking engagements.

Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing

Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. This talk will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complimentary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud computing environments. The discussion will appeal to anyone who has a good grasp of traditional data center infrastructure but is struggling with the benefits and migration path to a cloud computing environment. Systems administrators and IT generalists will leave the discussion with a general overview of the options at their disposal to effectively build and manage their own cloud computing environments using free and open source software.

IT Takes an (Open Source) Village to Build a Cloud

Not since the Linux operating system has there been such a disruptive technology movement in the data center as cloud computing. Just as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php/Perl/Python formed the open source foundations for the read-write web open source technologies like Xen, KVM and many others along with Linux are forming the foundations of the cloud. To truly build robust cloud computing environments it requires a wide variety of open source software that when combined create environments that are much greater than the sum of their parts. This session will appeal to both operational users and technology developers who want to gain a perspective on how infrastructure components and management tools can be combined to deliver highly available, scalable cloud services.Additionally the discussion will cover the standards and conventions needed to ensure cloud computing remains open.

 The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Cloud Computing

Imagine it’s eight o’clock on a Thursday morning and you awake to see a bulldozer out your window ready to plow over your data center. Normally you may wish to consult the Encyclopedia Galáctica to discern the best course of action but your copy is likely out of date. And while the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a wholly remarkable book it doesn’t cover the nuances of cloud computing. That’s why you need the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cloud Computing (HHGTCC) or at least to attend this talk understand the state of open source cloud computing. Specifically this talk will cover infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and developments in big data and how to more effectively take advantage of these technologies using open source software. Technologies that will be covered in this talk include Apache CloudStack, Chef, CloudFoundry, NoSQL, OpenStack, Puppet and many more. [For those of you that are Douglas Adams fans please accept the deepest apologies for bad analogies to the HHGTTG.]