First off I'll say this: Kudos to you if you've managed to convince your boss that you need to go to Barcelona for the upcoming OpenStack Summit. You're a better negotiator than I.

I've gone to the past four consecutive Summits, but this one does not look like it's going to happen. And honestly I think it's Barcelona's fault. The city itself. Something about its architecture, its weather, its very name, suggests that you won't be getting much work done while you're there. So understandably, IT managers around the world are wondering right now whether sending members of their teams to such a dazzling, sangria-drenched locale is truly a wise investment.

I say it is. If you've ever attended an OpenStack Summit you know you'll work your tail off for 10 hours a day selling your product or attending sessions or presenting or collaborating in the developers lounge (or all four of those), then you'll go to social events each night to network with other members of the OpenStack community. You'll explain what you do and why your company is at the Summit twenty more times. You'll join a new working group. You'll meet the PTL from a project you've been contributing to for two years. It will be amazing.

It will also be hard to quantify. Things like making community connections and increasing awareness of your product are not easily measured.

But new technical knowledge most certainly is. And if there's one thing Cisco is bringing to the Summit, it's technical knowledge. So take a look at the list of Cisco speaker sessions below, fill your schedule accordingly, and when you come back and your boss asks what you did in Barcelona for a week, you'll be able say "Learned how to deploy and manage a stack with Kubernetes, gained a ton of insight into how we can increase the impact of our overall cloud strategy, and picked up all kinds of tips for avoiding failure with our OpenStack deployment. Want me to explain it in the meeting on Wednesday?"

Your boss will be happy. You'll be happy. And the team from Cisco will most certainly be happy that they had the chance to meet you and share the latest OpenStack innovations.

Have a great time!

Deploying Apps on OpenStack: Things We Found While Playing Around

Bite Off More Than You Can Chew, Then Chew It: OpenStack Consumption Models

Making Meetup Magic: Growing the OpenStack Community Through Local Events

OpenStack is an Application! Deploy and Manage Your Stack with Kolla-Kubernetes

Put Applications/NFV Performance Optimization Intelligence Into Your Cloud

QoS QoS Baby

The Path to Becoming an AUC (Active User Contributor)

Cloud Strategies for Greater Business Impact

Deploying IPv6 in OpenStack Environments

BrokenStack: OpenStack Failure Stories

RabbitMQ at Scale, Lessons Learned

Horizon Project Overview

Gluon -Accelerating Development of New Networking Services for OpenStack 

The Latest in the Container World and the Role of Containers in OpenStack

Sponsored Track Sessions:

Metacloud -OpenStack in the Enterprise

Accelerating NFV Deployments on OpenStack

OpenStack and the Cisco Next-Generation Datacenter: Customer Stories from BBVA, KazTransCom, SAP, and Standard Bank of South Africa

ML2/VPP - Blazingly Fast Networking for Neutron 

Containerization of OpenStack Services at Cisco and SAP to Gain Operational Advantage

vBrownBag Talks:

Colusa -Cisco UCS C3260 and Ceph for Object Stores

A Scalable Neutron ML2 Mechanism Driver for the VPP Platform

Hands on with Containerized Deployment of OpenStack

Achieving Significant Scale in an Incredibly Short Amount of Time -What We Learned from OSIC Scale Testing

Jumbo Mumbo in OpenStack