{:width=375} Next week is the first ever ManageIQ Design Summit, and the agenda looks great - a real opportunity to learn more about cloud management in general, and how we're shapping the roadmap of ManageIQ in particular. Here are some of the highlights of what you'll see:

Event Kick-off - October 7, 9am

Oleg Barenboim will discuss where we are, engineering-wise, and then Xavier Lecauchois, CloudForms product czar, and Jarid Cottrell, Booz Allen Hamilton architect, will talk about the state of cloud management and where ManageIQ fits.

Extend Track

There are two tracks in the design summit, extend and design. The extend track is all about how you can utilize ManageIQ, color outside the lines, and push it beyond the scope of what it does "out of the box".

John Hardy and Brad Ascar give Tour de Force of ManageIQ

If you've ever been curious about how to do more with ManageIQ and automate All of the Things, the first day will be a wonderful experience for you. From utilizing state machines and navigating the ManageIQ object model to mastering the powerful policy engine and using ManageIQ as a RESTful backend platform, these talks are key to understanding how to tailor ManageIQ for your environment. For additional information on these topics, see their recent podcast.

Creating a Cloud Services Broker on ManageIQ - Booz Allen Hamilton

Jarid Cottrell and Nirmal Mehta, whom you may have met on the ManageIQ podcast, (notice a trend?) will give an overview of their cloud broker and how they built it on ManageIQ. Their project is a testament to the power and versatility of ManageIQ as a platform.

Extending ManageIQ's IPAM Feature Set - Cox Automotive

JD Calder and Jason Cornell will discuss how they modified ManageIQ to fulfill their self-service requirements. And yes, JD also appeared on the podcast.

Design

The design track will consist of developers plotting out the next release - and beyond. If you want to push the project into the future, or you just need to know, this track is for you.

Modularization Direction and Roadmap - Oleg and Jason Frey

As of now, ManageIQ is a single monolithic release, but that may not be the case in future releases. You can hear about some of this in Jason's podcast.

Heat/CloudFormation Integration - Greg McCullough, Bill Wei

Orchestration is big - and essential to future development. This talk will focus on two of the main technologies for cloud automation and how to interface with them.

Plugin Provider Architecture - Greg Blomquist, Jason Frey

One important thing on the roadmap is the ability to more easily add in new service providers. At the moment, adding a new provider is manual and non-trivial.

Cloud Broker Integration Roadmap - Jarid and Nirmal

Jarid and Nirmal talk about how to integrate future versions of their cloud broker project with the ManageIQ object model and UI.

Upgrading to Ruby 2.x / Upgrading to Rails 4.x - Joe Rafaniello, Aaron Patterson

These are actually two separate sessions separated by lunch. ManageIQ is a Rails application, but it is built on outdated Ruby and Rails architectures. Time to figure out how to upgrade them. Aaron gave us a preview of what the work entails in his podcast.

Hacking Room

If you're inspired to start a project as you're surrounded by the talented folks in the community, we will supply a breakout room for you to do just that on Wednesday, October 8. Get some developers and enough caffeine to do the job and do something cool.

Be there!

These are just the highlights - there's more where that came from. Take a look at the agenda and see what you can see. Enjoy the show!