Summit Tracks

Plan your week! See how the session tracks are grouped into audience categories, by day.

Enterprise IT Strategies
Enterprise IT leaders building their cloud business case are facing unique requirements to manage legacy applications, new software development and shadow IT within industry regulations and business constraints. In this track, we'll discuss how OpenStack is meeting enterprise IT technical requirements and cover topics relevant to planning your cloud strategy, including culture change, cost management, vendor strategy, hybrid cloud, how to manage legacy applications and recruiting.

Evaluating OpenStack
If you are evaluating cloud technologies or building your cloud strategy, this track will cover the basics for you to evaluate the technology, understand the different ways to consume OpenStack, review popular use cases and determine your path forward.

Architectural Decisions
If you are a cloud architect or involved in planning your cloud srategy, this track will discuss popular reference architectures, configuration options, workload optimiziation, and architecture show and tell, where experienced users will share their architectures and experiences.

Case Studies
Sharing knowledge is a core value for the OpenStack community. In the case sudies track, you'll hear directly from enterprises, service providers and application developers who are using OpenStack to address their business problems. Learn challenges, best practices and measured results.

Networking
The networking track will feature technical presentations, use cases, design and implementation discussions relevant to cloud networking, specifically topics like SDN, scale, IPv6, policies, HA and performance.

Storage
The Storage track will feature technical presentations, use cases, design and implementation discussions relevant to cloud storage and OpenStack.

Operations
The Operations track is 100% focused on what it takes to run a production OpenStack cloud. Every presenter has put endless coffee-fueled hours into making services scale robustly, maximizing uptime, and automating, automating, automating. The track will cover efficient use of existing tools, managing upgrades and staying up-to-date with one of the world's fastest-moving code bases. If you're already running a cloud, you should also join us in the Ops Summit for some serious working sessions (no basic intros here) on making the OpenStack software and ops tools for it better.

Security
Cloud security is a very important topic for IT executives and operators, and this track will feature technical presentations, design and implementation disussions relevant to security and OpenStack.

HPC / Research
HPC is one of the earliest and most popular use cases for OpenStack, allowing operators to run workloads on standard hardware rather than supercomputers. In this track, we'll discuss reference architectures, best practices and case studies for high performance computing.

Big Data
Big Data collection and analysis is a common use case for OpenStack infrastruture. In this track, you'll learn about specific reference architectures and use cases, along with updates on relevant OpenStack projects like Sahara, which rapidly provisions Hadoop or Spark clusters for big data analysis.

Cloud App Development
A large community of application developers and ecosystem of development tools is growing around OpenStack. This track will be for users who are building and deploying applications on OpenStack clouds, and cover topics like automating and managing application deployment, application software configuration, SDKs, tools, PaaS and big data.

Containers
OpenStack provides a single platform and set of APIs for virtual machines, bare metal and containers. Many organizations looking to adopt cotainers to increase speed for their developers have found OpenStack to be their path to production. In this track, learn how containers fit with OpenStack, including reference architectures, use cases and updates from popular containers projects like Magnum and Kuryr.

Telecom / NFV
Telecommunications companies present one of the largest growth areas for OpenStack around the world. Working together with the OPNFV project, we'll feature content relevant to these telecom operators and the greater telecom ecosystem, addressing the evolution of the network and emerging NFV architecture, and growing consensus across the industry around a standard, open source technology approach.

Project Updates
The OpenStack community continues to innovate on a six-month release cycle. This track provides an opportunity for users and ecosytem members to hear directly from technical contributors, covering the latest features and what's on the roadmap for their projects.

How to Contribute
The How to Contribute track is for new community members and companies interested in contributing to the open source code, with a focus on OpenStack community processes, tools, culture and best practices.

Upstream Development
Presentations in this track are targeted toward prospective and existing contributors, to discover new processes, learn about common cross-project features or libraries you should adopt in your project, or share best development practices.

Related OSS Projects
There is a rich ecosystem of open source projects and communities adjacent to OpenStack that are very important to OpenStack users. In this track, we'll learn about relevant technologies, as well as how these different communities are working together.

Cloudfunding
Startups are critical to drive new innovations in the OpenStack community and the broader cloud computing market, and keeping a pulse on the startup community is critical for any user or company in the OpenStack ecosystem. This track will highlight new and successful startups and discuss where investors are seeing the most opportunity.

Products & Services
OpenStack's vibrant ecosystem and the different ways to consume it are among it's greatest strengths. In this track, you'll hear about the latest products, tools and services from the OpenStack ecosystem.

Community Building
OpenStack is a large, diverse community with more than 75 user groups around the world. In the community building track, user group leaders will share their experiences growing and maturing their local groups, community leaders will discuss new tools and metrics, and we'll shine a spotlight on end user and contributing organizations who have experienced a significant internal culture change as participants of the OpenStack community.

Working Groups
This track is meant for established OpenStack community working groups to organize meetings, share reports and findings. These are primarily collaborative working sessions rather than presentations.

Birds of a Feather
For the first time, the OpenStack Summit will formalize BoF sessions are part of the call for speakers. BoFs are not presentations or working sessions; they provide a chance for the community to gather informally around a specific topic. Topics should be non-commercial and relevant for the OpenStack community.

Hands-on Workshops
At the OpenStack Summit Austin, we're focused on education and training, with more hands-on workshops for operators and application directors than any ever before. We'll also offer the new Certified OpenStack Administrator exam on-site. Workshops will require an RSVP and pre-requisites from your instructor. Bring your laptop and walk away with OpenStack skills.