Users to Take Center Stage at the Paris OpenStack Summit

On Monday the OpenStack® Summit kicks off in Paris, and estimates are that nearly 4000 people from around the world will be attending what I believe will be the best summit yet. It will also be my ninth summit, so to say that I’ve had an opportunity to see the project, community, and user base grow is an understatement.

My favorite activity at the summits has always been talking to people that use OpenStack to make magic happen for their companies. Not the data center teams, but the application developers, operations and devops teams, cloud architects, etc. Every six months when the community gets together, there’s more of these end-users, and that’s a great thing. In Atlanta this past spring it was great to peek at peoples badges and see their company names. Virtually every sector of industry was represented, from the biggest banks to tiny social startups.

The shift to users is most evident in who is on stage. Just a few years ago the keynotes were 100% vendor talks about the future of OpenStack, in Atlanta earlier this year they were split between users being on stage and vendor talks, and in Paris, it’s truly about the users. Beyond the keynotes, a high percentage of the talks that got accepted involve user stories, or are actually being led by users.

If you’re a user, come find me or Niki at the summit and let’s chat about what you’re doing with OpenStack. We will be recording chats with users that are willing to go “on the record” and turning them in to blog posts showing off what users like you are doing with OpenStack. You could be Internet Famous!

Best way to hunt us down will be on Twitter: @scottsanchez or @nikiacosta, or at the Metacloud or Cisco booths on the expo floor. We will be giving away the highly anticipated People of OpenStack playing cards at the Metacloud booth, so make sure to come by and grab one!

See you in Paris!

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Follow Scott on Twitter: @scottsanchez