Today local governments are under extreme pressure to reduce cost, and at the same time improve services. Can cloud computing be part of the solution?

The discussion focused on this idea, will explore current successes and future possibilities of using cloud computing in local government.

This talk will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complimentary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud computing environments.

Are the various security concerns of cloud computing versus traditional environments warranted? How can things be improved or can the story be better told?

Discussion of the effects of social media on the workplace and the marketplace and what's next?

What are the most critical aspects to consider in the provider, the infrastructure, etc.?

This discussion would be focused on strategies for managing images and instance configurations in a cloud. For example:

Do you prefer minimizing the number of different base images, and installing / configuring a "personality" for each instance based at launch time on instance data, or do you create more specialized images to reduce run-time configuration time?

Which tools have you found most useful for configuration management (Puppet, Chef, RightScale, StarCluster, etc.)?

What could cloud providers be doing to make all of this easier?