I love fall—the colors, the refreshing change in the air, the fall vegetable harvest. The best thing about this time of year, however, is SUSECON. It's happening this year November 7–11 in Washington, DC.

SUSECON has become a flagship conference in the industry for many of the same reasons I love fall: crisp, refreshing content that invigorates your brain and gets you thinking about new possibilities. SUSE customers, partners and general open-source enthusiasts learn about new open-source solutions from both SUSE and upstream projects. Project contributors meet enterprise users who meet commercial technology vendors who provide solutions that help businesses prosper.

Every year I get feedback from SUSECON attendees that the quality of content at our conference is extraordinary. Not only are the topics varied, but they also are presented by SUSE engineers, product managers, customers and partners who are able to give more than just a cursory overview. Our presenters get into the meat of their topics. Presenters are accessible to all attendees for questions and answers throughout the conference, should there be any questions that are not answered during the presentations themselves. Session content is not centered solely on SUSE products, but it focuses on the underlying technologies and the projects that create them. This approach helps make SUSECON one of the greatest tech conferences in the industry.

Here's a preview of what's coming in SUSECON 2016, including more than 150 sessions.

75 technical tutorials covering both products and technologies (they are not the same thing).

• SUSE product tutorials include the latest updates on SUSE products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, SUSE Manager, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, SUSE Enterprise Storage and more.

• Projects and technologies covered in tutorial sessions include Ceph, CephFS, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes, KVM, LDAP, Manila, OAuth, openATTIC, OpenDOC, OpenStack, RADOSGW, Salt, SSSD, Sudoers and many more.

• Partner products that are featured in tutorial sessions include Active Directory, CentOS, Oracle (12c and RAC), RHEL and SAP HANA, plus there are a host of sponsor sessions where sponsors demonstrate how their outstanding solutions tie into the SUSE ecosystem.

• Technical sessions cover a broad range of topics, including Benchmarking, Big Data, Block Mirroring, Containers, DevOps, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, HPC, Hyper-Convergence, IoT, Live Patching, Modules, Monitoring, Public Cloud, Security, System Hardening and VM lifecycle management. There are more, but there's not enough room to include them all here.

100 hours of hands-on training on SUSE products as well as other technologies, such as Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes, Salt and SSSD.

22 futures sessions where attendees hear directly from SUSE engineers and product managers about what is coming next in the SUSE products they depend on. Presenters lay out the road maps for product development and openly discuss which upstream elements are going to be incorporated into the next generation of SUSE enterprise solutions. And participants get the chance to go straight to the source to plug their favorite technologies.

16 case studies from SUSE customers and partners who give real-world insight into structuring and implementing SUSE solutions in their organizations. These case studies cover topics such as:

• SAP HANA deployment and high availability tuning.

• Migrating to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on a mainframe.

• Cloud deployment with Kubernetes.

• Implementing NFV on SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

• Migrating legacy SAN environments to a distributed Ceph cluster.

• Converting a data center to an enterprise public cloud.

16 business-level sessions where attendees can go to get high-level overviews of technologies that are new to them or to understand SUSE's position on controversial issues within the Open Source community. These sessions are a great way to break into a new discussion and understand many sides of a technology topic.

For enterprise users who'd like a truly deep dive on a specific topic, SUSECON also offers four pre-conference workshops for an additional fee. These workshops are a full day of hands-on training under the expert tutelage of the SUSE training team. The four pre-conference workshops are:

• Securing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

• Install and Configure a Ceph Cluster with SUSE Enterprise Storage 3.

• Deploy a Highly Available SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

• SUSE Manager 3 New Features.

There is far more content at SUSECON than can be listed here. For more, review the session catalog here.

One of the great benefits of SUSECON is that after attendees have learned all about open-source technologies, they can prove their knowledge to the world. They can take SUSE certification exams on Linux, Storage, OpenStack Cloud and Linux Management, and the exam fee is included in the price of the conference. Seats in the exam sessions are limited, so attendees should register for them as soon as they can.

As you think about what you love about fall, think about SUSECON, with the most exciting technology, the greatest expert access and the best conference value in the technology industry.