With another successful year of SNIA Storage Developer Conferences (SDC) completed, SNIA on Storage spoke with Mark Carlson, 
SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair, on 2018 highlights and 2019 plans to educate and support this important technical community.
SNIA On Storage (SOS): In 2018, SNIA volunteers provided key resources and time supporting our storage developer community, a central focus for the Technical Council. What activities were the TC most pleased with in 2018?
Mark Carlson (MC): For the past several years we have been pushing SDC to expand globally. Starting with SDC India and this year adding SDC EMEA, we are reaching developers around the world now with educational content. Each year we get better and better talk proposals and the hard part is not being able to present more content. I always encourage developers to submit talks on their latest discoveries and architectures. Other developers want to hear about it.
SOS: There was a lot of good feedback on the content from SDC North America in 2018. What was your overall impression of this 21st SDC event?
MC: We had more folks than ever attending SDC 2018 and there was great energy in the sessions – particularly those hallway track ones. We had strong topics and speakers with 16 keynotes as well as the breakout sessions and BoFs. I enjoyed hearing about new architectures such as Computational Storage and composable infrastructure. And for those who missed attending in person, all 100 session presentations are available for download from the SNIA web site.
SOS: What are some of the highlights for those who could not attend?
MC: SNIA’s new activities on computational storage were well received. The keynote from Andy Walker on the Evolution of Solid State Memory was of high interest. Also Storage Lessons from High Performance Computing by Gary Grider of Los Alamos Labs generated lots of good questions.
SNIA recorded all the keynotes and general sessions, which are available on the SNIA Video channel. The Technical Council has also chosen the audio recordings of the best breakout sessions to be available as podcasts, with a new one released every week. They can be found on the SNIA podcast site and are available on Apple iTunes. The 2018 podcasts begin with #76. You can also find podcasts from previous years on that page.
SOS: Now that SDC has expanded beyond North America, what’s on tap for 2019?
MC: SNIA returns to Tel Aviv, Israel with the second annual SDC EMEA on January 30, 2019. Delegate registration is now open and is rapidly filling up. 
SDC EMEA 2019 is also running an SMB Plugfest all week and has also scheduled an afternoon Technical Seminar on SMB. You can register and learn more at https://www.snia.org/events/sdcemea
SDC will also return to Bangalore, India on May 23-24, 2019. The call for presentations is open at https://www.snia.org/events/sdcindia. The SNIA India developer community is very strong and has an important role in establishing this agenda. We welcome all companies with developer activities in India to participate in SDC and also in the SNIA India T/E/N meetups which happen throughout the year.
SOS: Great talking with you, Mark, and we look forward to an excellent year of storage developer education in 2019.