What to expect from the Conference and Design Summit

In less than two weeks now, the community around OpenStack will gather in Santa Clara for two co-hosted events: the OpenStack conference and the Diablo Design Summit. In this post I’ll explain what attendees should expect from both, and give some precisions on how the Design Summit will be run.

OpenStack Conference

The OpenStack conference will run on two days, from Tuesday April 26 to Wednesday April 27. This is a classic conference, with speakers making presentations on various OpenStack-related topics. We’ll have keynote sessions on Tuesday morning, then parallel technical and community tracks will run during Tuesday afternoon. The day will end with a reception sponsored by Cisco. On the Wednesday, the “User track” will run during the morning and the “Service provider” track will run on the afternoon.

Diablo Design Summit

The Diablo Design Summit will run on three days, starting Wednesday morning to end on Friday evening. It’s a gathering of OpenStack developers to discuss how the next releases of OpenStack should be made and brainstorm the design of the key features we’ll add. Developers submit blueprints, those are turned into session topics and scheduled in the available session slots.

Since developers are currently busy getting the “Cactus” release out, we expect the schedule to start to take shape during next week. You should expect sessions on release management to occur on the Wednesday morning, and once the expectations are set, various sessions on Nova, Swift, Glance and other OpenStack projects spread throughout the 3 days of the event. Sessions will be categorized so that it’s easy to tell what the topic is by looking at the schedule.

The sessions are held in fishbowl-style room layout, with a session lead (usually the submitter of the blueprint) moderating the discussion. You can look up the whole process in more details at http://wiki.openstack.org/Summit

During the three days, after lunch, we’ll also have Lightning talks to let attendees have a forum to quickly talk about their crazy idea, present their product or do a quick demo. Every subject is OK as long as it’s OpenStack-related ! Those will be openly-scheduled on a whiteboard, everyone is free to book available 5min slots.

On the social side, Wednesday evening there will be an OpenStack Developer Gathering in the developer lounge, sponsored by Niciria. On the Thursday evening we’ll have our traditional Developer party, sponsored by Cloudscaling.

I hope this clarifies what the events are all about, and I’m excited to see you all in less than two weeks now !

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