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title: Details
meta-description: Details of the topics for, and organizers of ScaleConf, South Africa
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          <h1>Details</h1>
          <p>More information about the topics and the people behind ScaleConf</p>
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              <h2>Focus</h2>
              <p>The conference will bring together an audience and speakers covering areas of interest such as: </p>
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              <p style='color:#447; padding:0 0 0 15px; font-size:15px; line-height:1.5em;'>Configuration Management, Infrastructure as Code, Monitoring and Metrics, Continuous Deployment, Virtualization, Software as a Service, NoSQL, Scalable Database design</p>
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                  <dt>Configuration Management</dt> <dd>Tools for the storage and management of your systems configuration across all your environments and servers mean that reproducing a system is trivial, and the days of wikis and lists of configs to tweak are gone.</dd>
                  <dt>Infrastructure as Code</dt>   <dd>Your systems and servers are defined in code, along with all installed applications, dependencies and configuration. You can take advantage of version control and agile principles in your systems administration as well as in developing your software.</dd>
                  <dt>Monitoring and Metrics</dt>   <dd>Without intimate knowledge of the baseline performance of your systems, it is impossible to tell where a problem or bottleneck arises when things go wrong. Metrics can show you where you will gain most business value from optimisation.</dd>
                  <dt>Continous Deployment</dt>     <dd>The Shangri-La of release management: your code is released as you commit to revision control. The methods and tools and best practices to achieve this safely will allow you to start releasing improvements dozens of times a day without breakage or downtime.</dd>
                  <dt>Virtualization</dt>           <dd>New tools and best practices for managing virtual server clusters give you the ability to create and tear down correctly configured servers and running services in seconds, speeding up your development lifecycle exponentially.</dd>
                  <dt>NoSQL</dt>                    <dd>Increasingly, certain types of application are requiring an alternative to traditional relational databases. Key-value in-memory stores like Redis or Memcached and document stores like MongoDB and CouchDB offer new approaches to solving issues that data-storage systems face at scale.</dd>
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              <h2>Organisers</h2>

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                          <div class="span2"><img class='speaker' src='images/speakers/jonathan.jpg'/></div>
                          <div class="span3"><h4>Jonathan Hitchcock</h4>
                              <p><a href='http://www.twitter.com/#!/vhata'>@vhata</a></p>
                              <p>
                              Having watched the company he currently works for grow and being forced to learn how to deal with the associated problems, Jonathan has become passionate about DevOps, high availability, automation and the culture and mindset that supports these things.
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                          <div class="span2"><img class='speaker' src='images/speakers/duncan.png'/></div>
                          <div class="span3"><h4>Duncan Phillips</h4>
                              <p><a href='http://www.twitter.com/#!/nuknad'>@nuknad</a></p>
                              <p>
                              Passionate about web development, its supporting architecture, and Open Source. Currently following the DevOps movement into unknown areas with scalability and automation using configuration management, monitoring, and command and control.
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                          <div class="span2"><img class='speaker' src='images/sponsors/lessfuss.png' width='90px'/></div>
                          <div class="span3"><h4>LessFuss</h4>
                              <p><a href='http://www.twitter.com/#!/lessfuss'>@lessfuss</a></p>
                              <p>
                              An affordable online personal assistant service, helping busy people and companies get more done.
                              </p>
                              <p style='margin:10px 0;'><a href='http://lessfuss.co.za/' class='btn success'> find out more &raquo;</a></p>
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