It’s time to exhale: Our first Structure 08 conference, slated to be held on June 25th in San Francisco, is almost sold out. With a week to go we have just 25 tickets left, and I have to tell you that despite the long sleepless nights ahead, I’m pretty jazzed about the event.

Amongst ticket buyers, we’ve seen a lot of venture capitalists that are clearly looking at the infrastructure space with some interest, possibly for investments. Also attending will be a lot of people from large corporations as they try to make sense of this whole evolution. Despite how central this issue has become to my writing lately, the mix of people is surprising even to me.

And yes, I’m totally biased, but the line-up of speakers and panelists for the conference would give anyone a serious IQ turbo boost. I recently spent some one-on-one time with speakers such as Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris and Aster Data Systems’ Mayank Bawa, and was amazed by their depth of knowledge. Here’s a quick rundown of the keynotes, panels and workshops:

Keynotes: Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon.com), Jim Crowe (CEO & President, Level 3 Communications), Greg Papadopoulous (CTO, Sun Microsystems)

Fireside Chats: Parker Harris (Co-founder, Salesforce.com), Dr. Mendel Rosenblum (Co-founder, VMware)

Mini-Notes: Debra Chrapaty (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Roberts (Founder, Anagran), Jonathan Yarmis (AMR Research), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), & Dr. Jonathan Koomey (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) Drew Perkins (Co-Founder, Infinera)

Panels:

• Working the Clouds: NextGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs
• The New New Stack: Re-examining the Internet Platform Chain
• The Race to the Next Database: Overclocking and Analytics Augment Your Data Layer
• Harnessing Explosive Growth: Infrastructure Strategies and Tactics
• Infrastructure On Demand: Should You Build Your Future on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
• Eyes Wide Shut: Why is the VC Community Keeping Its Wallet Shut to Infrastructure?

Workshops:

• Google App Engine: Learn how to harness the power of Google’s global infrastructure for your idea
• Microsoft Data Center Secrets: Get insights from Microsoft’s infrastructure team on building out large deployments.
• Fenwick & West Venture Capital and Seed Financing: Interact with entrepreneurs and prominent angels focused on raising money for infrastructure ideas.

I want to take a moment to thank our media partners, who have helped spread the word. And of course, none of this would be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. There are many of them, and we thank them all: