ScaleConf to address the future of online sites and services

Experts from around the world will come together in January for ScaleConf, a conference aimed at addressing the “challenges and future of building and running online sites and services”.

Conference organisers claim the event, taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, will “cover the culture and methodologies used to architect and develop the strong foundations that enable large-scale web companies to function smoothly, and smaller ones to grow gracefully”.

It aims to do this with a speaker line-up that includes the likes of Coda Hale of enterprise social network Yammer, Chris Brown of cloud infrastructure automation specialists OpsCode, Zach Holman of online project hosting company Github, and Simone Brunozzi from Amazon Web Services.

The idea behind the conference came from two operations engineers at site-builder Yola, Jonathan Hitchcock and Duncan Phillips.

“We created the conference because there’s a growing startup focus in Cape Town, and with that comes the need to build web applications at an unprecedented scale. While in the US, I had attended some great technical conferences, and I wanted to bring that level of quality to South Africa,” says Hitchcock.

Phillips claims that its aim “is to promote the best practices and technologies that will help drive a world-class DevOps culture here in South Africa”.

The organisers believe the conference will be of particular interest to “members of technical teams that face dealing with a growing customer base, and the problems that arise as their service grows”.

Phillip and Hitchcock also claim that “it is easy to forget that site reliability is an essential component of building a great customer experience”. As such, they say that “the conference will also appeal to business and product people who spend their days figuring out how to make users happy.”

The conference has the backing of mobile messenger social network, 2go.im and Basho, who developed the popular distributed database, Riak.