Windows-based IaaS: Lessons in the Cloud - The Recovery.Gov Story

Session Date and Time: Day 1, March 23, 18.45pm EST (15.45pm West Coast) (45min)
Keywords: windows, iaas.
Authors: Erren Lester, Director of Product Management, Synteractive, Inc.
Abstract: In this session, we will tell the story of how a small, highly motivated team of people leveraged the cloud to develop the highly available, highly performing, data driven site called http://www.recovery.gov. Recovery.Gov is the site used to track the $800B+ stimulus spending aimed at creating or saving jobs during the economic crisis. The redesign, which focused on making detailed recipient data transparent all the way down to the state and local government, was under the supervision of Vice Pres. Joe Biden and had a successful release to the public in only 10 weeks. That's right, 10 weeks from inception to development to deployment of a Microsoft .NET based solution running on the Amazon cloud. And to make it even more interesting, we should add that the entire site is running on SharePoint 2007.

The overall theme of this session will be focused on how to effectively use public IaaS clouds such as Amazon to deliver a best of class Windows-based solution. Many of these lessons learned led to the creation of CloudAdvantage.

BIO:

Erren Lester is the Director of Product Management at Synteractive, where he manages Synteractive's CloudAdvantage platform. In this role, Erren brings a passion for entrepreneurship and innovation. This spark, combined with a dynamic, collaborative approach, is successful at solving tough and unique client challenges. Erren brings 14 years of product development and project management experience, working on complex and massively scaling web services problems. Prior to Synteractive, Erren worked for Microsoft, where he managed the design, development, and release of highly scalable, extensible web services platforms with 100's of millions of users. At Microsoft, he contributed to at least 10 major web service releases where his team-focused efforts received multiple patents and divisional awards. Erren has an MBA from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow. He also received a B.S. in Computer Science, with a minor in Multimedia Production from Carnegie Mellon University.