Have you ever flown to Sydney, Australia?

I haven't, so I took a moment to look up average flight times from my own home airport (LAX), as well as a few others, and all I can say is "Wow."

Australia is far away. I may not have appreciated just how far previous to this brief little research effort, but now I do. Best case for me coming from Los Angeles is a non-stop flight with 15 hours of travel. If you're coming from New York City you're in for at least one stopover and 22.5 hours of flight time. And lest you think I'm being provincial, it's 23 hours from Paris. Twenty-two from Tokyo. Twenty-seven from Oslo.

This isn't to say that having the Summit in Sydney is a bad thing. I think it's a great thing. OpenStack adoption as been growing faster internationally than it has in the U.S. according to the latest user survey (61% of users and 74% of deployments areoutsidethe U.S.), and it's hardly fair to drag the whole world to North America every six months when we can just as easily hop on a plane and go to a new place. And that's without even getting into the fact that it's nice to add a little adventure to an otherwise rote exercise (if you go to the Summit on a regular basis). So there we go-for the sake of fairness and adventure, I think we can all agree that Sydney is a good thing.

That said, if you're going to travel that far to get to a Summit, you've got a vested interest in making that travel worth it. You want to leave knowing that you didn't spend a minimum of 30 hours round trip folded up like human origami in coach so you could sit in sessions that were not useful. (A double negative seems to have slipped into that sentence, but you know what I mean.) You want to climb back into your narrow, minimally padded airline seat at the end of the week knowing that it was a great investment of your time.

With that in mind, I argue that it is more important than ever for you to take an active part in setting the Summit agenda. I'm only going to list the proposed Cisco sessions below, because I work for Cisco and love Cisco and want to get the word out about all the cool things we're doing with OpenStack, but please note that this is not an all-inclusive list. In fact, it's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of talks that have been proposed. So if you don't find what you like in this list, click here, visit the official Summit site, and do a search for the topics that interest you. Then vote. Today. The polls close in just one week!

Here's hoping we meet up in Sydney.

Telecom and NFV

Turbocharing OpenStack for NFV Workloads, Vinay Rao, Ian Wells, Ajay Simha (Red Hat)

It's a Mutlicloud World After All, Abishek Subramanian, Vinay Rao, Hareesh Puthalath

Achieving NFV Network Services in OpenStack, Ian Wells, Bin Hu (AT&T), Sukhdev (Juniper)

Compostable Atomic Virtual Network Functions (VNFa) as Hypermedia Objects, Juan Ramon Acosta

The Business Case and Strategy for Using Kubernetes on OpenStack, Ernest De Leon, Zhi Bing Wang

Cloud and OpenStack 101

OpenStack for Marketers (and Anyone Else Needing a Quick and Dirty Overview), Ali Amagasu, Anne Bertucio (OpenStack Foundation), Kent Wimmer (SUSE), John Dickinson (SwiftStack)

Heat Orchestration Using Ansible, Aman Sinha, Nagendra Kumar, Sachin Joshi

OpenStack Administration Essentials for Beginners, Veena Lingadahalli, Mohankumar Navaneethan (Cavium Networks), MD NADEEM (Red Hat)

A Way to Manage Logs in OpenStack Deployments, Marga Millet

Hands-on Workshops

Encryption Workshop: Using Encryption to Secure Your Cloud, Dave McCowan, Ade Lee (Red Hat), Juan Antonio Osorio Robles (Red Hat), Kaitlin Farr (JH-APL)

Business and Strategy

Continuously Improve Your Multicloud Environment, Enrico Fuiano

Community and Leadership

Combining Open Source with Open Standards, Charles Eckel

Selling OpenStack! Secrets from the User Groups, Gary Kevorkian, John Studarus (OpenStack San Diego UG), Beth Cohen (Women of OpenStack), Lisa-Marie Namphy (OpenStack Bay Area UG), Jessica Field (OpenStack UG Australia)

Architecture and Operations

OpenDaylight as a Platform for Network Programmability, Charles Eckel

Brownfielding OpenStack: From Bare Metal to Containerized Control Plane, David Lapsley, Chet Burgess, Nicolas Simonds

OpenStack Upgrade: Our Journey from Liberty to Ocata, Ajay Kalambur, Shail Bhargava, Richard Winters

Delivering a Highly Scalable Cloud with Neutron and OpFlex, Sharmin Choksey, Ajay Kalambur, John Wu

Artemis: Machine Learning Based Approach to Proactive Cloud Monitoring, Ajay Kalambur, Pradeep Chandrasekar, Vinod Pandarinathan

Hands-on Lab: CloudBurst, Multi-cloud Test Manager on Kubernetes, Ajay Kalambur, Pradeep Chandrasekar, Vinod Pandarinathan

Hands-on Containerized Deployment of OpenStack, Charles Eckel

Hands-On Lessons in Deploying Versatile Storage Arrays as Cinder Multi-Backends in OpenStack, Al Lau, Yuming Ma

Using HTTPS to Secure OpenStack Services, Dave McCowan, Juan Antonio Osorio Robles (Red Hat)

Multi-Region Cloud Front-End Layer, Thin or Thick?, Liping Mao, Ian Zhang

Learn How to Use VPP and ML2 networking-vpp to Get the Best Network Performance, Ian Wells and Naveen Joy

Et cetera, Et cetera, etcd -Yul Brynner in Your Datacenter, Britt Houser, Chris Ricker, Josh Lothian

Kolla-Kubernetes Installation Workshop, Serguei Bezverkhi, Vikram Hosakote, Rich Wellum (Lenovo)

The Ins and Outs of Penetration Testing an OpenStack Cloud, Sebastian Jeuk, Deepika Gupta, Brian O'Neill (Rapid7)

Enhancing Openstack API Security with Layered Authentication, Aman Sinha, Nagendra Kumar, Sachin Joshi

Security Challenges in an NFV Deployment, Sebastian Jeuk, Deepika Gupta

Taking OpenStack from Open Source to Open for Business: A Case Study, Vinod Pandarinathan, Chandra Gangly, Danny Choi

Dynamic Security Orchestration Using DPI and Machine Learning, Aman Sinha, Meenakshi Sundaram Lakshmanan, Nagendra Kumar

Best Practices of Tuning Container Datapath Performance with Kuryr-libnetwork Upon OpenStack, Liping Mao, Ian Zhang

A Use-Case Driven Introduction to NFVi Characteristics, Their Benefits, and Impacts on vNFs, Sebastian Jeuk, Deepika Gupta

Dynamic Service Chaining -DynaScale, Vinay Rao, Marga Millet, Yichen Wang

NFVi Data Plane Performance Measurements and Optimizations on OpenStack, Alec Hothan, Yichen Wang

Monitoring for Service Assurance in NFV Private Clouds, Hareesh Puthalathm Abishek Subramanian, Michael Shannon (Zenoss)

Containers and Cloud-Native Apps

Designing Cloud Native Applications with Microservices and Containers Over OpenStack, Hector Morales

CI/CD for Containerized OpenStack Services, John Wu, Pradeep Chandrasekar, Sharmin Choksey

OpenStack Images That Fit Your Imagination -Deep Dive Into Container Images in Kolla, Vikram Hosakote, Micha? Jastrz?bski (Intel), Rich Wellum (Lenovo)

Logging Diver Agnostic Container Logs, Seanna Vien, Nick Hayward, Ralf Rantzau

Cisco IT -Application Centric Cloud with Mitaka OpenStack and Cisco ACI Networks, William Bloom, Sagar Gattepally

Poke-a-Pike -Upgrading OpenStack with Kolla, Vikram Hosakote, Duong Ha-Quang (Fujitsu), Micha? Jastrz?bski (Intel)

Containers with Embedded Intelligence for Optimal Deployment of Virtual Network Function, Juan Ramon Acosta

Building and Deploying a Kubernetes Microservices Platform on OpenStack, Ernest De Leon, Zhi Bing Wang

Contribution and Upstream Development

Contributing to OpenStack, Ying Zuo

Building Your Own Horizon, Ying Zuo

Taking Openstack From Open Source to Open for Business, A Case Study, Vinod Pandarinathan, Chandra Ganguly, Danny Choi

Project Updates

Barbican: Project Update, Dave McCowan

Kolla-Kubernetes from Boston to Sydney, Pushing for 1.0, Serguei Bezverkhi