Why do I believe that everybody interested in performance should come to CMG’12?
CMG’12 is an annual conference organized by Computer Management Group – a volunteer organization of professionals specialized in performance, capacity, and IT service management. This year it is held in Las Vegas, December 2-7, 2012.
Why I love CMG, spend a lot of my time organizing and promoting it, and coming there every year (sometimes on my own)? Well, because I believe that it is the best (and actually the only) conference on performance and capacity, the main topic of my interest for the last fifteen years. There are many conferences on specific topics. For example, the Velocity conference, devoted to web performance, is significantly larger and more popular – but it is still devoted mainly to single-use web performance, leaving all other performance and capacity questions to CMG. Let me share some of my excitement – of course, from my personal point of view (there is plenty of other highlights, but I am mentioning only the ones that are close to my heart).
This year the conference covers all aspects of performance (well, almost all – performance is so sophisticated subject that there is always much more to learn) from Web Performance Optimization (the conference opens by the keynote by Patrick Meenan, a web performance Google guru and the creator of WebPagetest) to mainframe performance (and everything in between).
The conference starts with a half-day workshops – see here the description. In addition to workshops, there are CMG-T sessions during the whole conference. Each CMG-T class spans 2 or 3 session spots, so it could easily be considered as a workshop or a training class. All led by renown experts with tons of experience, you hardly would get anybody even remotely close if you engage in a typical vendor class (not to mention a unique vendor-neutral or vendor-agnostic perspective you hardly find anywhere else). You have the CMG-T track through the whole conference and every one of them is a gem:
- Capacity Planning by Ray Wicks
- z/OS Basics by Glenn Anderson
- Java Performance Analysis and Tuning by Peter Johnson
- Model and Forecasting Basics by Dr. Michael Salsburg
- Network Performance Management by Manoj Nambiar
- Windows System Performance Management and Analysis by Jeffry Schwartz
- Using SAS to Communicate Your Message by MP Welch
CMG’12 has 4 keynote/plenary session and almost a hundred regular track sessions going on from mid-Monday to mid-Friday. The conference is 5 tracks wide. One track, as I already mentioned, is CMG-T 101– type classes (with 301-depth). Others four tracks shared between five subject areas: Performance Engineering and Testing, Capacity Planning, Application Performance Management, IT Service Management, and Hot Topics. It is difficult to list all highlights – too many. While I know many great presenters and am fascinated by many topics, commenting every single one would take too much time and space. Probably you just need to look at agenda – there are three different views: preliminary agenda (overview, a day on a page), a list of abstracts in a single pdf document and search/scheduler (click on the abstract number to see the abstract).
One track on Wednesday is a Michelson award track. CMG is presenting Michelson award since 1974 (if you wonder, Albert Abraham Michelson was known for his technical accomplishments in measuring the speed of light and for his role as teacher and inspirer of others – and measuring is the key to performance). This year we will see many Michelson winners presenting: Dr. Connie Smith, the founder of Software Performance Engineering, Dr. Daniel Menasce, the author of many great books about performance and capacity planning, Adam Grummit, the author of the great Capacity Management book (ITSM Library) and the CMG president, Dr. Pat Artis, Bruce McNutt, and Dr. Michael Salsburg.
I believe that the main advantage of attending CMG is networking with best world experts in almost all areas of performance and capacity. Nowadays you can find all technical information on the Internet, but there is no substitution to face-to-face conferences to learn how to use it and what were people experiences, and, of course, to see the whole picture. Especially in performance: performance is the result of every design and implementation detail and you need to be learning all the time to keep up with coming challenges.
I am presenting there too: Load Testing: See a Bigger Picture on Thursday and
Performance Requirements: the Backbone of the Performance Engineering Process on Friday. Nothing comparing to other CMG’12 highlights, but I hope to trigger discussions around these two very important topics.
And, of course, it is Las Vegas – and Rio’s rate is $55 per night until November 14th. See you there!
