As you are probably aware, voting is open for the OpenStack 2016 Spring Summit. It is incredibly difficult to go through the entire list of abstract submissions. I’ve gotten wind of some of the more interesting submissions from EMC, WalmartLabs, Mirantis, and others. Following is an incomplete list of talks that I think are worthwhile and deserving of your votes. Caveat emptor.

Please note that if you have something interesting, send it over and I’ll take a look and add it to this list if it makes sense.

Following are the submissions and some commentary on them, roughly stack-ranked in my own order of interest. Links go to the voting page should you find them of interest.

Abstract Title My Take Voting URL
Closing the Interoperability Gap: Testable Reference Designs in OpenStack We’re adding interoperability to the OpenStack mission statement, but we still don’t understand how to get there; I’ll tell you. Vote Now!
The Test Takers’ Guide to the Certified OpenStack Administrator Exam Super useful - learn what you need to know to get certified; a no-brainer Vote Now!
Keystone V3: Challenges and approaches in building a multi-tenant cloud Tushar is one of Cloudscaling’s badass engineers and he’s going to tell you what’s up “ferrealz” with Keystone v3 Vote Now!
Deploying Persistent Storage for Containers with Heat Another badass Cloudscaler, Drew, is going to show-off EMC’s open source project REX-Ray, which provides an agnostic abstraction to connect containers to storage systems; great stuff Vote Now!
Eliminating Nova’s Storage Lock-in: A New Ephemeral Storage Architecture It is about time we shook up how Nova’s ephemeral storage system works; this is a must have Vote Now!
Cloud Operations at Scale This could be titled better, it’s about @WalmartLabs cool open source multi-cloud app management PaaS, called OneOps; should be very good Vote Now!
Lift and Shift More on OneOps but with a focus on migrating legacy workloads to OpenStack clouds, which is crazy, but needed Vote Now!
Heat and CloudFormation Compatibility, or Lack Thereof Drew again taking us through how to build Heat/CloudFormation templates that are cross-compatible Vote Now!
Persistent Storage in Containers with Magnum: Why and How to Do it Today More stuff on REX-Ray and containers but with a focus on Magnum instead of Heat; worth a look Vote Now!
VMware NSX and Mirantis OpenStack integration Networking still a challenge in OpenStack, here’s Mirantis on experiences with VMware NSX; probably useful Vote Now!
Pros and cons of various OpenStack consumption models Might be OK; seems like this topic has been beaten to death though Vote Now!