I’m back at Windy City Rails! Dr. Nic started things off with his talk, “The New Era of Orchestration: From Docker to BOSH to Cloud Foundry.”

What’s Orchestration? Here’s a brief technical rundown, and here’s a more comprehensive one (thanks, Wikipedia).

First off, though, Dr. Nic mentioned a book called The Phoenix Project, and I’m a sucker for book recommendations so that’s getting a shoutout. If enough of you tweet Gene Kim, maybe we’ll get a discount code. They gave ChefConf 2013 50% off, and  don’t see why we’re not just as good as whoever was at that conference.

Dr. Nic also mentioned this 12factor set of SaaS development orchestration guidelines.

He mentioned that we should have a good reason for doing things ourselves rather than using Pivotal Web Services or Heroku, so I tracked down those links on the off chance that anyone is unfamiliar.

Dr. Nic also talked about Docker—the highky-regarded distributed application platfcorm—and discussed its limitations (that it’s built to run on just one machine being a biggie).

Next up, Cloud Foundry, PaaS of choice for Verizon and Cisco, and BOSH for running it.

Dr. Nic offered free advice on this to those at the conference, and we have it on tape so he can’t deny you. Find him in the dark blue polo, or tweet him. Here’s his website, too.