At the last OpenStack summit, we spoke about our plans for the new national Research Cloud in Australia. This time around, six months on, we’ll be talking from real experience. By the time the summit hits SF, the cloud would have been operational for three months and have been scaled out to 4K cores. This talk will focus on the user story, how researchers are using the research cloud, and how are we supporting them in using the cloud as an innovative platform to create, share, collaborate and ultimately build new ideas. We will also take you on a sojourn, from selecting OpenStack to run this national cloud, designing the implementation, building it, operating it, developing policies for it, monitoring it, and making sure it ticks along smoothly, both the ups and the downs.