I've been attending conference in the "Internet space" regularly for about 12 years. I have enjoyed conferences about web technologies, open source, and programming languages technologies. Many, though not all, of the conferences I've enjoyed have been put on by O'Reilly — they put on some good shows.

Over the last two years I have immensely enjoyed my involvement with the Velocity conference. It is, in my opinion, the de facto conference on web performance and operations. Operations is about keeping it all running and web performance has embraced a definition of speedy content delivery and efficient browser execution. These two aspects of running large customer-facing systems are critical, but they are the bread of a sandwich and the meat is the "architecture."

So, where's the conference about how to architect systems that scale? I thought it might have been Structure, but this year's "buzz-compliant" cloud theme leaves me with a confident and resounding "no." Clouds aren't how you design and build scalable systems, they are simply one of many valid places "where" you build your design.

Fed up with all that, I went back home to OmniTI and asked "what can we do about this?" Our answer? Surge.

OmniTI has a reputation for scalable web applications and architectures. We didn't learn this stuff overnight. Like many of the success stories at Surge, we acquired experience through trial and error, constant collaboration between development and operations teams, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. But we still lean on our friends and peers to see how things can be done better.

Surge started as the brainchild of our employees wanting to bring the best and brightest in Web Operations to our own backyard...

I have to say that I have never before been so excited by a conference. Surge is the "how to scale" conference.