With just over two weeks to go before the OpenStack Summit EU, the Cisco team is starting to get very excited about being back at this awesome event. For those of you who have been to an OpenStack Summit before, you know what I'm talking about. This will be my 11^thSummit and I'm just as excited for this one as I was for my first in Hong Kong back in 2013. For those who have never been to an OpenStack Summit, this is THE must-attend event if you're involved in building or operating open infrastructure.

I live in California and spending 10-12 hours in a metal tube to get there may sound like a hefty price to pay but, once you're in Berlin (which is a pretty amazing city -with plenty in store for the history buffs), the Summit offers over 200 sessions and workshops on Container Infrastructure, CI/CD, Telecom+NFV, Public Cloud, Private and Hybrid Cloud along with members of open source communities like Ansible, Ceph, Docker, Kata Containers, Kubernetes, ONAP, OpenStack, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, Zuul, and more.

And, of course, beer! Why this wasn't scheduled for October is beyond me.

Cisco has been a sponsor at the OpenStack Summit for many years and continues this tradition in Berlin with a Premier sponsorship. We have a prime booth location in the marketplace (space A5) where we'll be presenting demos on Cisco Virtual InfrastructureManager (CVIM), Cisco ACI for OpenStack, multicloud networking, and some of the latest work we've been doing with Istio (an open source service mesh). Be sure to stop by for a demo or two -and pick up some cool swag that will help you find your way through the clouds.

Cisco also has four sponsor track sessions at the Summit:

Session#1: 13:40 -14:20

Multicloud Networking -Design Options

Presenter: Shannon McFarland

Session#2: 14:30 -15:10

MultifacetedEvolution ofCisco'sVirtual Infrastructure Manager (CVIM) CloudPlatform

Presenters: Chandra Ganguly, Neelima Mukiri, and Ajay Kalambur

Session#3: 15:20 -16:00

Deploying Cloud Native Apps with Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager (CVIM)

Presenters: Abishek Subramanian and Nikolay Fedotov

Session#4: 16:20 -17:00

BuildingNFV Solutions with OpenStack and Cisco ACI

Presenters: Ifti Rathore and Domenico Dastoli

These four sponsor track sessions will be held on the afternoon of 14 November in Messe Hall 7, Room 7.2a, Helsinki 1. I've been told by the event organizers this will make sense once you see a map of the venue. We'll see.

And, if that wasn't enough, Cisco is represented in nine talks on the conference track:

Tuesday, 13 November:

Encryption Workshop: Using Encryption to Secure Your Cloud

Presenters: Dave McCowan and Ade Lee (Red Hat)

11:00 -12:30

Beyond the Hype: Edge Computing Working Group Update

Presenters: Ian Wells (Cisco), Beth Cohen (Verizon), David Paterson (Dell EMC), Christopher Price (Ericsson), and Ildiko Vancsa (OpenStack Foundation/Moderator)

13:40 -14:20

Istio Mesh Expansion++: Dynamic Integration of OpenStack Workloads into an Istio Service Mesh

Presenters: Arvind Somya, Tim Swanson, and Robert Li

14:30 -15:10

Wednesday, 14 November

Barbican -Project Update

Presenters: Dave McCowan and Ade Lee (Red Hat)

14:55 -15:15

A Reliable etcd-based Messaging Architecture for OpenStack

Presenters: Naveen Joy, Jerome Tollet, and Ian Wells

16:30 -16:40

Thursday, 15 November

Barbican -Project Onboarding

Presenters: Dave McCowan and Ade Lee (Red Hat)

9:00 -9:40

Artificial Intelligence-based Container Monitoring, Healing, and Optimizing

Presenters: Sreekrishna Senthilkumar, Aman Sinha, and Sachin Joshi

9:50 -10:30

Are Your Secrets Secure?

Presenters: Dave McCowan and Ade Lee (Red Hat)

11:40 -12:20

Securing NFV

Presenters: Jean-Bernard Beuque and Jerome Tollet

16:20 -17:00

It's going to be a busy three days for the Cisco team. We hope you'll come find us at our booth or in one of our many speaking sessions.

If all this isn't enough to make you want to join us in Berlin at the OpenStack Summit, I don't know how else to tempt you. Oh, wait...the beer!

Hope to see you in Berlin!

Join Cisco at the OpenStack Summit EU:

November 13-15, 2018

Messe Hall and CityCube

Berlin, Germany