OStatic’s Updated Interview Series: Really Interesting Cloud and Big Data Influencers

The open source community is making more impactful contributions than ever to some major technology shifts. Cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things are creating  big shakeups, and the pace of development has quickened significantly recently. At OStatic, we've been conducting a series of interviews with influencers focused on these key technology areas.

In this post, you'll find our newly updated collection of interviews with really interesting people, including pointers to some previously done interviews that you may find compelling.

Our latest series of interviews with project leaders working on the cloud, Big Data, and the Internet of Things has included talks with Rich Wolski who founded the Eucalyptus cloud project, Ben Hindman from Mesosphere, Tomer Shiran of the Apache Drill project, Philip DesAutels who oversees the AllSeen Alliance, Tomer Shiran on MapR and Hadoop, the University of Washington team behind Grappa for data analytics, and co-founder of Mirantis Boris Renski. Here are the details.

The Grappa Team. One of the most interesting new tools in data analytics is the open source Grappa project, which scales data-intensive applications on commodity clusters and offers a new type of abstraction that can beat classic distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. In fact, Rich Wolski, founder of the Eucalyptus cloud project, enthusiastically pointed to Grappa as a very interesting project in our recent interview with him. We caught up with some of the leaders behind Grappa, who are based at the University of Washington, for an interview found here.

Philip DesAutels.  At the recent CES show, a number of Internet of Things products were shown. The AllSeen Alliance is focused on an open source software framework to advance IoT, and Philip DesAutels oversees the Alliance. Get his thoughts on the dramatic future of IoT here.

Rich Wolski. All the way back in 2008, OStatic broke the story of an open source cloud software project at UC Santa Barbara called Eucalytpus. Rich Wolski was the man behind it, and it, of course, drove Eucalyptus Systems forward.  We caught up with Rich for a follow-up talk now that he is back teaching at UCSB. You can find his thoughts here.

Ben Hindman. Mesosphere is a company doing some highly interesting work focused on a "datacenter operating system."  The work is focused on the Apache Mesos software project, and Ben Hindman from Mesosphere spent some time with us to discuss what Mesosphere is working on. Find the interview here.

Boris Renski.  In the cloud computing game, Mirantis has built a fantastic reputation focusing on OpenStack. Boris Renski is one of the co-founders of Mirantis and has a lot of great perspective on the rise of the open cloud. Find our interview with him here.

Tomer Shiran.  OStatic also caught up with Tomer Shiran, a member of the Apache Drill Project Management Committee, to get his thoughts on how Drill is making a mark as the world's first distributed, schema-free SQL engine. Find the interview here, and we did another interview with Tomer about his work with MapR and Hadoop in the Big Data space, here.

In addition to these interviews, you may find our "What's In Your Stack?" interview series, conducted previously, of interest. It includes talks with many notable cloud influencers. The interviews are found here:

CloudSwitch's Founder on What's in His Cloud Stack
CloudBees' Founder Discusses What's in His Stack
myClin Founder Discusses What's in His Stack
The Man Behind Swiss Federal Mapping Discusses His Stack
Lucas Carlson, Founder of PHP Fog, Discusses What's in His Stack
Standing Cloud's CEO: What in His Stack?