There’s more to the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Austin than barbecue and breakfast tacos. That delicious food will fuel you through 20 tracks and more than 400 sessions — including a bumper crop of telecom testimonials, containers sessions and on-site training.

For a sneak peak at the upcoming Summit, Superuser has outlined five highlights awaiting Stackers in Austin.

Get schooled at OpenStack Academy

OpenStack skills are in high demand as more companies adopt the cloud platform. This Summit offers a sharper focus on education and training, with more hands-on workshops for operators and application developers than ever before. We will also be asking a limited number of community members to pilot the Certified OpenStack Administrator exam on-site. It’s the best place to develop valuable OpenStack skills that meet market demands, so bring your laptop and take home know-how.

More tracks, more content – and a better way to schedule everything

With more sessions than ever before, seven additional new tracks were added to give you the content you crave. The newcomers are: Evaluating OpenStack, Big Data, Upstream Development, Architecture Decisions, Public Cloud Research and Cloud App Development. And, to make organizing your schedule easier, we’re launching a new, custom-built Summit app! Stay tuned for details. In the meantime, you can check out the schedule online.

Understand the momentum behind virtualization

The Austin Summit welcomes a new track focused on network functions virtualization (NFV) powered by OpenStack to meet the growing interest from global telecoms. Find out why AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and NTT are among the many organizations relying on OpenStack to implement NFV at their organizations and meet the developers and users actively shaping NFV in the open source community.

Meet the global brands who run on OpenStack

User stories always pack rooms at the Summit; everyone wants to hear new organizations detail how they’re innovating with OpenStack in production. Users ranging from financial services to retail to government organizations have shared their stories and answered questions for fellow users, whether they’re evaluating OpenStack, in testing or in production.

In Austin, you’ll hear from Nike, Ancestry.com, AT&T and State Grid Corporation of China, the seventh largest company in the world.

StackCity Austin: a Texas-sized community festival

On Tuesday night experience the best of what Austin has to offer at this huge community evening event. Stroll a few blocks from the Austin Convention Center and you’ll find an open-air party hosted at 15 bars and restaurants lining historic Rainey Street. Expect a few surprises in an evening offering something for everyone including live music from local artists, stand-up comedy, and, of course, barbecue and tacos.

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