About Velocity

Why attend | Experience Velocity | Who should attend | What people are saying | Program leadership

Modern systems pose a number of thorny challenges: they are inherently complex, span multiple technologies, groups, and sometimes different organizations altogether. Most poignantly, they fail in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. The O'Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place on the planet for web ops and systems engineering professionals like you to learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned for handling modern systems and applications.

Why attend

Build Secure, Resilient Systems
The O'Reilly Velocity Conference provides you with real-world best practices for building, deploying, and running complex, distributed applications and systems.

Quality Time with Experts
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet face-to-face with a cadre of industry leaders who are taking systems performance and operations to the next level. Bring your entire team to share ideas and get your toughest questions answered by the experts.

Four Days Devoted to Web Operations, DevOps, and Systems Engineering
Velocity packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into four concentrated days. You'll be able to apply what you've learned immediately and you'll be well prepared for what lies ahead.

Experience Velocity

• Inspirational keynote presentations that bring clarity to complex issues and new perspectives on the state of the art
• Immersive training courses and tutorials addressing critical topics and technologies
• Two days of technical sessions covering both practical and emerging issues
• An Exhibit Hall featuring dozens of the latest tools and products
• Fun evening events, Topic Tables at lunch, and plenty of networking opportunities

Who should attend

• Systems and site reliability engineers
• Systems architects
• Application developers
• DevOps practitioners
• Researchers and academics
• Teams engaged in operations, infrastructure, and cloud ecosystems
• CTOs and CIOs seeking to streamline operations

What people are saying about Velocity

Program chairs

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald is a content director at O'Reilly Media, where she works with the industry's leading practitioners to develop books, online courses, and training videos to help engineers and developers create and deploy complex, cloud native systems. She also co-chairs O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, held around the world in cities like San Jose, London, and Berlin. Nikki started out as a features editor at MacUser magazine back when people were still dialing up to the internet with AOL. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra is a distributed systems engineer at Fastly, where she spends her time helping the Web go faster. Ines holds an MS in computology with an emphasis on cheesy '80s rock ballads. She has a fondness for steak, fernet, and a pug named Gordo. In a previous life, Ines was a data engineer.

James Turnbull

James Turnbull is a CTO in residence at Microsoft. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of 11 technical books about open source software. Previously, he was CTO at Empatico and Kickstarter, VPE of Venmo, and an adviser at Docker. James likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.

Committee Members

Jane Adams (Two Sigma) is a data scientist at Two Sigma Investments, where she spends a lot of time thinking about how data are going to fail. Previously, she was a data scientist at Case Commons, a nonprofit that builds software for caseworkers in child welfare, where her team was responsible for consulting on UX patterns to enhance data quality, conducting research on child welfare policy, and determining best practices using those same data, among other things. Jane holds a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and an MS in urban data science from New York University. She is a frequent speaker at local meetups and international conferences on topics ranging from how to not accidentally hurt people with data to how ants find your picnic basket.

Marcus Barczak (Fastly) is a Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly where he works on the Platform Engineering team. Having first cut his teeth on MRTG back in the day through to exploring new ways of drawing insight from the millions of metrics at Etsy, Marcus loves helping people better understand how their software runs wild in production.

Silvia Botros (Twilio) is a principal engineer at Twilio SendGrid, helping send billions of emails a day for many household companies. In her spare time, she is busy with three Jr. DBAs at home (start them early!)

David Calavera (Netlify) is the CTO of Netlify where he and his team are building the best platform for deploying and automating modern web projects. Before that, he was a core member of the Docker Engine project, where he helped developers build the container engine that started the container revolution. David also built enterprise tools for GitHub and has contributed to numerous open source projects, such as Go, JRuby and many others.

Amy Chen (VMware) is a systems software engineer at VMware through the Heptio acquisition. She is passionate about Kubernetes, Go, containers, and distributed systems. In her free time, she also runs a Youtube channel that discusses various software topics.

Ian Coldwater (Independent) is a DevSecOps engineer turned red teamer, who specializes in breaking and hardening Kubernetes, containers and cloud native infrastructure. In their spare time, they like to go on cross-country road trips, capture flags and eat a lot of pie. Ian lives in Minneapolis and tweets @IanColdwater.

Yan Cui (DAZN) is a principal engineer at DAZN and an AWS serverless hero. Over his career, he has been an architect and lead developer with a variety of industries ranging from investment banks, e-commerce to mobile gaming. In the last two years, he has worked extensively with AWS Lambda in production, and he has been very active in sharing his experiences and the lessons he has learned.

Nora Jones (Netflix) is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix and a student of Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. She is passionate about resilient software, people, and the intersection of those two worlds. She co-wrote the book on Chaos Engineering with her teammates at Netflix and keynoted AWS re:Invent in 2017 to an audience of over 40,000 people about the technical benefits and business case behind implementing Chaos Engineering.

Michael Kehoe (LinkedIn) is a site reliability engineer at LinkedIn, where he specializes in building and maintaining a reliable, scalable system infrastructure. Previously, he worked with networks at the University of Queensland, built small satellites at NASA, and wrote thermal environments software at Rio Tinto.

Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft) is a principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if the cloud can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, Bridget traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the DevOps community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at Bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Nirmal Mehta (Booz Allen Hamilton) is the Chief Technologist in the Strategic Innovations Group at Booz Allen Hamilton specializing in research, implementation, and integration of emerging technologies to Booz Allen’s federal government client base. He leads the firm's efforts in containerization and distributed application architectures and thought leader for DevOps practices. He is passionate about Open Source, Containerization, Cloud Automation, DevOps, Machine Learning, Cultural Transformation and integrating open-source software to push the capabilities of future IT infrastructure. He focuses on bringing leading-edge technologies to enterprise systems for commercial and public sector clients. His other interests include immersive technologies, virtual and augmented reality and the intersection with Machine Learning.

Edward Muller (Salesforce/Heroku) is the Engineering Manager of Heroku's Operational Experience team which focuses on helping customers understand how their Heroku apps are operating. During his career he has written open source and closed source software in several different programming languages, run an ISP, architected systems at a large financial company, owned a cyber cafe, and designed, installed and managed networks running all sorts of systems from Linux to Microsoft Windows to Novell Netware. He has spent the last 11 years working on PaaS systems with a focus on operations, logging and observability.

Amy Nguyen (Stripe) is a software engineer on the observability team at Stripe, where she works to make data accessible for everyone. Outside of work, Amy writes about the tech industry, loves baking, and reads too many self-improvement books.

Devon O'Dell (Google) is a recovering competitive Guitar Hero and Rock Band addict, but still occasionally enjoys rhythm games and jamming on guitar and drums. Today, he is a Senior Systems Engineer at Google. Prior to Google, Devon held software leadership positions at Fastly and Message Systems, implementing high performance and low latency network servers. His experience over the past 17 years ranges from web applications to embedded systems firmware (and most areas in-between). His primary technical interests are developing and debugging low-latency concurrent network systems software and related tools.

Corey Quinn (Quinn Advisory Group ) is a Cloud Economist at the Quinn Advisory Group and an advisor to ReactiveOps. He has a history as an engineering director, public speaker, and cloud architect. Corey specializes in helping companies address horrifying AWS bills, hosts the (Screaming in the Cloud) podcast and curates (LastWeekinAWS.com), a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tips, sprinkled with snark.

Petru Ratiu (2Checkout) has been a system administrator for almost 20 years and discovered along the way that servers and scripts and funky one-liners are the simplest and most predictable parts of the System(TM). Now he spends most of his time debugging the people and processes that shape the aforementioned servers and scripts.

Baron Schwartz (VividCortex) is the founder and CTO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. Baron has written a lot of open source software and several books, including _High Performance MySQL_. He’s focused his career on learning and teaching about performance and observability of systems generally, including the view that teams are systems and culture influence their performance and databases specifically.

Jason Yee (Datadog) is a technical evangelist at Datadog, where he works to inspire developers and ops engineers with the power of metrics and monitoring. Previously, he was the community manager for DevOps and performance at O’Reilly Media and a software engineer at MongoDB. He’s currently exploring the world while living as a nomad and would love to hear about the part of the world that you call home.