Following the latest studies from 451 Research and Gartner, 6.1% of the global hosting market ($51bn) are already using public, cloud-based infrastructure (IaaS & PaaS).

On 7th of March 2013, policymakers will speak about the latest developments in cloud computing. The one-day conference will discuss how Europe can fully take advantage of the benefits provided by the Cloud.

The conference is hosted at The Renaissance Hotel in Brussels, costs 150 EUR and here is the agenda.

In an interview, and even during the short CV scanning, I try to find candidates that are smarter than I am in their field of work. I hire people from where I can learn from and with whom I really enjoy discussing new challenges or ideas.

A proven out-of-the-box thinking record is maybe the most important factor for me on a candidate. I don’t need yeasayers or zombie people who blindly follow my brain.

I need people who have own ideas and who are brave enough to proof that their ideas are better than other, but are also willing to be held responsible for failure. 

Leading smart out-of-the-box thinkers is just about reminding them on the general company vision and providing them with the most liberal working conditions. This frees the company management to focus on the really important things (company scaling and product) and actually allows a startup to scale. 

And I learned my lesson the hard way: whenever I wanted to install a middle management in my still young companies (less than 50 people) I realized that I just had the wrong people in some positions.

So, be bold and just hire people that are smarter than you. And no one else.

I am working on automating the bootstrapping and provisioning of a zoo of cloud servers and had to decide (again) what path to choose. I could build my own customized image and go from there or use a vanilla out-of-the-box Linux image and set it up during bootstrapping.

In the past, I chose the first path, because it allowed to quickly start new servers from one custom image (for example with PHP + Nginx), but on every system upgrade or change I had to fix running servers and create a new image for every introduced change. Which was a hell of work, especially if I had to keep all images in sync between cloud regions and maybe even cloud providers.

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I am a fan of Star Trek and I am 32 old. Just recently I realized that every male person I know in private life or at work is also a fan of Star Trek. They are all my age or some years older and are all working in the tech industry as creatives, techies or executives. 

My first contact with Star Trek was at the early 90s at the age of 12. For the next couple of years, I watched every afternoon Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) and was totally blown away. Not by the characters, my personal favorite Tasha Yar already died in season 1, but by the absolute positive picture of the future.

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It’s been nearly 5 months since my last blog post. The reason why I did not blog were that I was busy (what a bad excuse), but mostly that I was unsure about the content. I did not like to be the 1000th blog repeating fancy PR articles by  cloud firms, so better shut up.

The time I stopped blogging was also the time I personally dove into really serious cloud high-tech stuff and I would have loved to blog about it, but it was still absolutely confidential. Today the tech side of my work still is mostly confidential, but I am also doing a lot of other cloud-related topics at work and so I will change this blog now into being more of a personal work weblog. 

I will blog about latest cloud tech, but also about its business in general. 

All that may sound blurry, but I promise it will be clear soon and I will unveil what I am working on, step-by-step. In general, the blog will be more specific, more personal, but also more cloud. 

Do you want to be immediately informed via SMS when a AWS Availability Zone goes down? Or any other major event happens in the Amazon Cloud?

I found a free(!) way for this task and it even works for international cell phone numbers. The solution is to use the new and free web service “If this then that” to monitor the AWS Status RSS feeds. In Ifttt-speak that means: “IF THIS (=a new post at the AWS RSS feed arrives) THEN send the post to me via SMS”. And here is the step-by-step instruction:

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