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.

Read the full article:Users to take Center Stage at the Paris OpenStack Summit