PaaS 2014 - IEEE International Workshop on the Future of PaaS

The cloud revolution of IT started with the obvious first step: to virtualize computing resources. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds expose vast amounts of resources, on demand, to anyone in the world; and for a fraction of the cost needed if the same resources had to be provisioned otherwise.
However, the vast majority of cloud users do not care about resources as much as they do about their applications and middleware (or stack), which they want to run efficiently and in a scalable manner on top of some IaaS cloud. Enter Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which results in complete stacks of software that can easily be executed and be managed on top of an IaaS. By converting the development and operations (DevOps) actions and software stack configurations into data and code, one can easily "execute" a stack description and realize it using IaaS resources.
IaaS and PaaS work together to make the cloud revolution a reality today. However, the uptake of these two groups of technologies, in order to go mainstream, face various hurdles. For instance, how do we make sure the PaaS applications work in hybrid (private and public) clouds? How do we deal with IaaS failures at the PaaS layer? How to cope with catastrophic failures (remember the AWS apocalypse of 2012)? And how to allow idiosyncratic platforms to run on PaaS that generally tend to be designed for the mainstream stacks?
In this workshop, we have gathered a program committee of mostly industry leaders in the nascent PaaS space, as well as seasoned academic leaders in middleware and systems and cloud research to create a program that will try to explore the current avenues, dead ends, and boulevard, that make the future of PaaS.
Call for Papers
Please find the CFP details and submit papers here.
Organizing Committee
Isabelle Rouvellou, IBM Research
Ignacio Silva-Lepe, IBM Research
Han Chen, IBM Research
Michael Maximilien, IBM Research
Progam Committee
Michael Behrendt, IBM CTO Office
Patrick Chanezon, Microsoft Azure Cloud
Kyle Chard, University of Chicago
Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology
Christopher Ferris, IBM Cloud Group
Jim Frank, IBM Germany
Karthick Gomadam, Accenture Research
Nima Kaviani, University of British Columbia
Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Ajith Ranabahu, Amazon Web Services
Dr. Nic Williams, Stark and Wayne; keynote speaker