Cloud Computing has redefined what we call “infrastructure”. What used to be the hardware and other components that resided within the confines of our own buildings, now lives out in the cloud effectively turning infrastructure into a service (IaaS). Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service is Microsoft’s new service targeted at businesses that wish to extend or migrate their existing infrastructure into the cloud. We will spend time in this session discussing the new services, demoing features, and speaking about some of the possibilities the Cloud based IaaS extends to administrators.

Bio:
Chris started his career at Microsoft in 1994 as a contract customer service representative during the Windows 95 launch. At the time, he did not know who Bill Gates was or what Microsoft did prior to applying with the company. Why? He was a hard core Apple user and had been since the late 70′s. Chris left the company as a contractor in 1996 and returned 1 year later as a full time employee supporting networking technologies for Windows NT 4.0 Server and client connectivity. Shortly afterwards, he started supporting the Small Business Server product. In 2002, Chris took on the role of IT Evangelist and speaking to IT Professionals about the great products and technologies Microsoft had to offer. Since then Chris has embraced live events and social media (Twitter – @chrisavis, blog – http://chrisavis.com) as a way to get the word out to IT Professional in the US and around the world. When not geeking out on technology, Chris enjoys camping, hiking and traveling. He is also an avid Guitar Hero player and karaoke singer. If you ever want to go do some karaoke, let me know!

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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.

As a society, we have come to rely upon a diverse assortment of computer systems to carry out essential tasks ranging from stock market transactions to Internet searches to FaceBook updates. Such systems are often expected to stay operational 24×7, come hell or high water. At the same time, software and systems have become increasingly large and complex, and therefore prone to failure. The task of debugging and diagnosing these failures can be as intricate as needlework and as Herculean as wrangling an angry rhinoceros. In this talk, I will give an overview of recent research projects that try to tame the systems beast using tools from machine learning and statistics. These methods analyze and mine the data contained in large volumes of automatically generated system logs, looking for clues as to why the system is failing. The results are meant to aid human operators in honing in on parts of the system that may require attention. I will describe successes and failures in this domain, and give some ideas of where we might go next.

Bio:
Alice Zheng is a researcher in the Machine Learning Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. She spent her formative graduate student years at UC Berkeley, working on using statistical methods to automatically diagnose software failures. She spent two years at Carnegie Mellon University as a postdoc, working on analyzing social networks and diagnosing file systems. Since joining Microsoft, she has worked on lock contention problems in the Windows operating system. More recently, she is working on building tools that automate machine learning to enable easier and wider applications.
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As always, there will be dinner sponsored by Silicon Mechanics. Check them out at http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

There will also be several CACert assurers present.

The meeting will be at the Electrical Engineering building on the University of Washington Campus, aka EE1. Directions are linked to the EE Department’s web site above. Parking is $5 after 5pm.