OpenStack Summits are a whirl of energy—from session rooms with standing room only, all-day trainings to onboard new Stackers and an expo hall with over 100 companies explaining new products and performing live demos.

The OpenStack Summit Boston will keep up that momentum.

From May 8-11, thousands of attendees will gather at the Hynes Convention Center to hear the latest OpenStack use cases, project updates and cross-community opportunities to collaborate. A few weeks ago, the OpenStack Foundation announced the addition of Open Source Days to the schedule where different open source foundations and projects have the opportunity to program a full day’s content. Ten organizations are participating—you can find sessions from Ceph and Open vSwitch on the schedule now.

This morning, we announced new users that will be sharing their use cases in Boston, including GE Healthcare, Verizon, Bloomberg and Gap Inc. With a four-day schedule packed with over 300 sessions, it can be easy to miss some of the big use cases that will be available to hear in Boston, so here is a handful of my personal picks.

Gap Inc.

Speaking at an OpenStack Summit for the first time, Gap Inc.‘s infrastructure architect, Eli Elliott will discuss how OpenStack can be used to make businesses move faster from online sales, to web point of sale in stores, and even pipeline and manufacturing capabilities. He will explain how this approach enabled dev-ops, user self service and a multi-billion dollar omni-pipeline using OpenStack at Gap.

Paddy Power Betfair

I love data and it looks like Superuser Awards nominee, Paddy Power Betfair does too. Paddy Power Betfair started using OpenStack in 2015. Fast forward two years and their team has migrated 25 percent of its production applications onto OpenStack and its team has an end goal of 1,300 KVM compute nodes, split over two data centers which will make up 100,000 cores and 2.08 petabytpes of storage. Now that is scale. Want to learn how? Join one of their four Boston Summit sessions to meet the team and hear their story.

The U.S. Army Cyber School

The U.S. Army Cyber School (USACYS) will have a brief appearance in Monday’s keynotes before going in-depth with Summit attendees in a 40-minute breakout session. Major Julianna Rodriguez and Chris Apsey, director and deputy director at USACYS, will explain how they went from three borrowed servers connected to users via CAT6 cables running through a drop ceiling to a 2,000-core cluster backed by a 4PB Ceph array that is 100 percent code-driven. They will also discuss their continuous integration pipeline that integrates their Blackboard LMS, Heat and their AsciiDoc-based curriculum-as-code repository.

UK Civil Service

The UK government has recognized that shared services and micro-services on a common open cloud infrastructure have a wide role to play in how individual departments innovate. James Curran and Justin Cook from the UK Civil Service will explain how this approach, on Red Hat OpenStack hosted by UKCloud, is being used to streamline the process for UK companies to import and export licenses.

Adobe Advertising Cloud

After analyzing the cost effectiveness of cloud bursting, Nicolas Brousse, the director of engineering and operations at Adobe Advertising Cloud will discuss how to burst workloads from an OpenStack private cloud to AWS public cloud, the network constraints and challenges while doing cloud bursting and the realities of a multi-cloud environment.

Stay tuned as we continue to preview OpenStack Summit Boston talks.

If you have a talk you would like to recommend, we’d love to hear from you: email [email protected].

Haven’t registered yet? Hurry, prices increase this Friday, April 14 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time Zone.

Cover photo courtesy of the OpenStack Foundation.