Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice - the very essence of Cloud Computing - has become ever more crucial in today's challenging business landscape.

Werner Vogels explored the many challenges of building a reliable, flexible architecture that can manage unpredictable behaviors of today's Internet business this afternoon during his opening keynote at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York City.

The main focus of his keynote session was state management - one of the dominating factors in the scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of the overall system.

Vogels started off his keynote by showing a video from Animoto, which doesn't own any infrastructure and uses Amazon's. All Animoto's storage goes into Amazon services.

Other companies Vogels mentioned were Facebook and NASDAQ.

If you are building a new application, for example for Facebook, scaling is required in case it becomes highly popular. Many use the Amazon platform to build services.

NASDAQ wanted to minimize risk. With cloud, customers can download apps and get access to historical information and the risk to NASDAQ is minimal. They are shifting the cost of infrastructure from a capital expense to a variable cost.

Due to the increasing uncertainty in the market, companies need to reduce risk. When companies acquire resources, they only want to pay for those resources that they really use.

Innovations around cloud computing are not only technical. We see the cloud as transparent. Companies need to provide an infrastructure service to break this transparency for developers.

There will be five points that cloud computing providers will be evaluated on: security, scalability, availability, performance, and cost.

2nd International Cloud Computing Expo opens today in New York City

Record Attendance For Cloud Computing Expo with More Than 1,200 Delegates
1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, last November in San Jose attracted more than 1,200 delegates from 43 different countries.

Virtualization Conference Attracts More Delegates Than Any Recent Gartner Event
Last year's Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City was larger than any recent Gartner event with more than 1,500 delegates attending from 37 different countries.

Leading Virtualization and Cloud Computing Companies As Conference Sponsors
Upcoming event in New York City is sponsored by more than 30 leading Virtualization and  Cloud Computing technology providers including such companies as: 3Tera, Aria Systems, AppSense, CA, Corporate Technologies, Cycle Computing, EMC, ExactTarget, IBM, MeetTheBoss.com, Metron, Microsoft, mindSHIFT, ParaScale, RightScale, Sun Microsystems, Tranxition, VIRTERA, and Zeus Technology.

Most Distinguished Conference Faculty of 2009
2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, colocated with 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo presents the most distinguished faculty of speakers on any technology conference taking place in 2009. Speakers, general session  and keynote presenters include such names as: ,Ajay Anand (Yahoo!), Alan Williamson (AW 2.0 Ltd), Anthony Arrott (Trend Micro), Bill McColl (Cloudscale), Bob Quinn (3Leaf Systems), Brian H. Prince (Microsoft), Brian Zanghi (Kadient), Bryan Wade (ExactTarget), Clod Barrera (IBM), Daniel Beveridge (VIRTERA), David Bernstein (Cisco), David Bressler (Progress Software), David Douglas (Sun Microsytems), David Linthicum (Blue Mountain Labs), Doug Tidwell (IBM), Ed Sullivan (Aria Systems), Glenn Brunette (Sun Microsystems), Jeff Bauer (Forbes.com), Jeremy Geelan (SYS-CON Media), Jim Rymarczyk (IBM), Joe Gregorio (Google), Joel York (Xignite), John Barr (Yieldex), John du Pre Gauntt (Media Dojo), John Laferriere (Corporate Technologies), Jon Pyke (Cordys), JP Morgenthal (J.P. Morgenthal Blog), Kenneth Oestreich (Egenera), Kevin L. Jackson (Dataline), Kristof Kloeckner (IBM), Lucian Lipinsky de Orlov (VIRTERA), Martin Ingram (AppSense), Matt Holleran (Emergence Capital), Michael Hill (IBM), Omer Trajman (Vertica), Owen Garrett (Zeus Technology), Patrick Kerpan (CohesiveFT), Pau Garcia-Mila (eyeOS), Peter Coffee Salesforce.com), Peter Nickolov (3Tera), Phil Fritz (IBM), Prasad Rampalli (Intel), Raghavan Srinivas (Intuit), Ranjith Ramakrishnan (Cumulux), Reuven Cohen (Cloud Interoperability Forum), Rich Wolski (University of California), Ronnie Thomson (Quark), Russ Daniels (HP), Sajai Krishnan (ParaScale), Scott Wiener (Cloud9 Analytics), Simon Wardley (Canonical), Stephen Elliot (CA), Steve Milroy (OnTerra Systems), Stuart Charlton (Elastra), Thorsten von Eicken (RightScale), Tien Tzuo (Zuora), Tim Crawford (Stanford University), Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems), Warren Wilbee (Microsoft), Werner Vogels (Amazon.com), William Fellows (The 451 Group).