Speakers

Yaniv Aknin is Google Cloud Platform’s lead for quantitative reliability. He works with product managers, developers, and fellow SREs to create availability and performance metrics that accurately model customers’ experience, then optimizes those metrics toward the right reliability/cost point. He’s been an SRE with Google since 2013, working on network infrastructure and several parts of the Google Cloud Platform. He has over two decades’ experience solving business problems in corporate, early startup, government, and nonprofit organizations. Outside of work, he enjoys travel, food, improv theater, and pop-sci, especially behavioral economics.

Sean T. Allen is vice president of engineering at Wallaroo Labs and a member of the Pony core team. His turn-ons include programming languages, distributed computing, Hiwatt amplifiers, and Fender Telecasters. His turn-offs include mayonnaise, stirring yogurt, and sloppy code. He’s one of the authors of Storm Applied.

Kyle Anderson is an engineer at Yelp. He’s been building systems to be proud of for more than 10 years.

Dave “Bear” Andrews is chief architect at Verizon Digital Media Services, overseeing the evolution of the Edgecast content delivery network (CDN) and Uplynk video platform. He enjoys low-level security exploitation techniques and has an appreciation for the nuances and resulting surprised faces that accompany discovering failure modes in globally distributed systems. Previously, Dave brought several web security products to market at Verizon Digital Media Services and worked for startups in the Los Angeles area, building security products in the virtualization and CDN spaces. He holds a PhD in computer security from a small university in Australia.

Kolton is the founder of Gremlin – helping companies build more robust services. He was a Chaos Engineer at Netflix, focused on the resilience of the Edge services. He designed and built FIT: Netflix’s failure injection service. Prior he improved the performance and reliability of the Amazon Retail website. At both companies he has served as a ‘Call Leader’, managing the resolution of company-wide incidents. Kolton is a father of 5. He is passionate about building resilient systems, primarily as it lets him break things for fun and profit.

Ricardo Aravena is an infrastructure manager at Rakuten, helping automate everything in containers using open source and lately contributing to the Kata Containers project. He’s been working in tech for more than 19 years and comes from a diverse professional background, including roles at large companies such as Cisco and VMware as well as startups such as Coupa, Hytrust, Exablox, and SnapLogic. Most recently he he spent two years at Branch Metrics working on automating the company’s cloud infrastructure to handle millions of requests and petabytes of data on a daily basis.

David Aronchick leads open source machine learning strategy at Azure. He spends most of his time helping humans convince machines to be smarter. (He’s only moderately successful at this.) Previously, he led product management for Kubernetes on behalf of Google, launched Google Kubernetes Engine, and cofounded the Kubeflow project. He’s also worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and Chef and cofounded three startups. When not spending too much time in service of electrons, he can be found on a mountain (on skis), traveling the world (via restaurants), or participating in kid activities, of which there are a lot more than he remembers when he was that age.

Mehant Baid is a software engineer at Dropbox. For the past few years, he’s been working on Edgestore, the distributed data store that handles all of Dropbox’s metadata needs. Previously, he worked on the database kernel at Oracle, where he focused on scaling inserts into the database. He’s a committer and project management committee member with the Apache Software Foundation and worked with the open source community to develop Apache Drill—an SQL engine for Hadoop, NoSQL, and cloud storage. His primary interests are the fields of distributed systems and databases.

Ben Bleything is a developer and sysadmin from Seattle, Washington. He’s best known as one of the world’s leading experts in the emerging field of clown computering. In his spare time, Ben is a developer advocate at Google, where he’s focused on making the experience of operating software on Google Cloud as awesome as possible.

Zack Bloom is the director of product for product strategy at Cloudflare. Previously, he was the cofounder of Eager (acquired by Cloudflare in 2016). Zack is the author of the JavaScript used in open source libraries that total more than 50,000 stars on GitHub, are included in Twitter Bootstrap, and are used on over a million websites.

Tim Bonci is a lead operations engineer and an IT adrenaline junkie focused on working across teams to enable Vistaprint engineers to deliver software quickly and safely. Tim is passionate about staffing, problem solving, and systems-level thinking. His life before IT was as varied as biotech, broadband engineering, and wine, leading to a jack-of-all-trades approach.

Nicolas Brousse manages and scales the Adobe Advertising Cloud Infrastructure. Previously senior director of operations engineering at TubeMogul and the company’s sixth employee, Nicolas has grown TubeMogul’s infrastructure over the past decade from several machines to a few thousands servers that handle hundreds of billions of requests per day for clients like Allstate, Chrysler, Heineken, and Hotels.com.

Adept at adapting quickly to ongoing business needs and constraints, Nicolas leads a global team of site reliability engineers and database architects that monitors Adobe Advertising Cloud infrastructure 24-7 and adheres to DevOps methodology. Nicolas is a frequent speaker at top US technology conferences and regularly gives advice to other operations engineers. Before relocating to the US, Nicolas worked in technology for over 15 years, managing heavy traffic and large user databases for companies like MultiMania, Lycos, and Kewego.

Alex Chen is the senior director of product management at Alibaba Cloud, responsible for storage products and function compute. Previously, he spent over 19 years at IBM, where he was the worldwide business executive for IBM Enterprise Storage XIV, IBM File Storage offerings, and IBM Software Defined Storage offerings among other roles. He also led various business development efforts for IBM, including the acquisition of Texas Memory System in 2012, and divestiture of System X to Lenovo in 2014. He holds six US patents from his early career as a storage software development engineer, and he worked on enterprise block storage, tape systems, and storage management software development.

Amy Chen is a systems software engineer at VMware through the Heptio acquisition. She’s passionate about Kubernetes, Go, containers, and distributed systems. In her free time, she also runs a YouTube channel, Amy Codes, that discusses software engineering and distributed systems topics.

Guilin Chen is a software engineer at Facebook, where he works on mobile performance and leads the Instagram efficiency team.

Uma Chingunde leads the compute organization at Stripe, a team within the company’s larger infrastructure organization that supports all Stripe engineers and customers by providing a reliable and scalable platform. Uma started her career in the distributed systems space, working on key virtual machine technology at VMware as an engineer and then manager. Previously, she was an engineering manager at Delphix, supporting the core teams building the Delphix virtual appliance. She has a master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.

Ian Coldwater 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 as @IanColdwater.

Jennifer Davis is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Previously, she was a principal site reliability engineer at RealSelf and developed cookbooks to simplify building and managing infrastructure at Chef. Jennifer is the coauthor of Effective DevOps and speaks about DevOps, tech culture, and monitoring. She also gives tutorials on a variety of technical topics.

Sebastien Deleersnyder is a cofounder and managing partner of Toreon, providing professional ICT security services to customers in Belgium and abroad. As security project leader and information security officer, he’s built up extensive experience in information security-related disciplines, both at strategic and tactical levels. He specializes in application security, combining his software development and information security experience. He’s performed several successful secure development lifecycle projects in the financial and utility sectors, started up software security groups, supported customers in selecting and implementing web application firewalls (WAF), delivered web application security training, and closed a lot of audit findings regarding application security. Sebastien started the Belgian Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as chapter leader, was a member of the OWASP foundation board, and performed several public presentations on web applications and web services security. He also co-organized the yearly security and hacker BruCON conference and trainings in Belgium.

Kevin Dunne is the GM of Tricentis Flood, ensuring his team’s continued commitment to innovation and delivering tools for creating software that scales. With a deep interest in the emerging trends in software development and testing, Kevin is dedicated to collaborating with thought leaders in this space. Previously, Kevin was at Deloitte, where he managed testing on large government and Fortune 500 engagements delivering enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations and custom software development. As one of the first employees at QASymphony, Kevin saw many facets of the business, working in sales, customer support, marketing, and product management. Kevin holds a BS from Vanderbilt University.

Alex Elman is a site reliability engineer at Indeed. He’s studied and practiced resilience engineering at Indeed for seven years with the goal of making failure within distributed systems a boring nonevent. Even after moving into a leadership role, Alex continues to carry a pager, believing that incident response is a valuable learning opportunity.

Lachlan Evenson is a principal program manager on the Azure Containers team at Microsoft. He has spent the last two and a half years working with Kubernetes and enabling cloud native journeys. Lachie serves as a cloud native ambassador and TOC contributor and has deep operational knowledge of many cloud native projects.

Rustem Feyzkhanov is a machine learning engineer who creates analytical models for manufacturing industry at Instrumental. Rustem is passionate about serverless infrastructure (and AI deployments on it) and has ported several packages to AWS Lambda from TensorFlow, Keras, and scikit-learn for ML to PhantomJS, Selenium, and WRK for web scraping.

Kat Fitzgerald is a principle security architect at Uber ATG taking on the challenge of IoT, cloud, and k8s security architectures and engineering. She has (many) years of experience in the security field, with an emphasis on security operations, incident response, and purple teams. Previously, she spent five years at Apple in Cupertino as senior security architect/engineer. Based in Pittsburgh and a natural creature of winter, you can typically find her sipping Casa Noble Anejo while simultaneously defending her systems using OSS, magic spells, and dancing flamingos against a barrage of attackers. Running IoT honeypots on k8s clusters running on Raspberry Pis has upped the ante on her security research toolbox.

Liz Fong-Jones is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and site reliability engineer (SRE) with 15+ years of experience at Honeycomb. Previously, she was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife, metamours, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in San Francisco and Seattle with her other partners. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights as a board member of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Lorenzo Fontana is an open source software engineer at Sysdig, where he primarily works on Falco, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that does container runtime security and anomaly detection. He’s passionate about distributed systems, software-defined networking, the Linux kernel, and performance analysis. He’s the maintainer of the IO Visors Project’s kubectl-trace.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is VP of Research & Strategy at GitHub. She is author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), a professor, performance engineer, and a sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Gustavo Franco is a customer reliability engineer at Google working on learning more about, helping to define, and expanding the reach of SRE. In his 12 years at Google, he’s started, moved, and managed several SRE teams including Google Plus Frontend, BreakFix, Horizon Web, Cluster Turnups, Apps Media, Apps Messaging, G Suite, and Cloud Identity.

After many years of ghostwriting, Emily Freeman made the bold (ridiculous?) choice to switch careers into software engineering. Emily is the author of DevOps for Dummies (April 2019) and the curator of JavaScript January. A former VP of developer relations, Emily is a cloud ops advocate at Microsoft and lives with her daughter in Denver, Colorado.

Karthik Gaekwad is a cloud native developer advocate at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. A veteran engineer, he enjoys building software products from scratch using cloud and container technologies. Previously, he worked in both large enterprises and startups, including National Instruments, Mentor Graphics, Signal Sciences, and StackEngine (acquired by Oracle). He organizes several conferences including Devopsdays Austin and Container Days, and he’s an accomplished author for LinkedIn Learning. Karthik holds an MS in computer engineering from the University of Arizona. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with family in his hometown of Austin, Texas, dabbling in new product ideas, and blogging.

Sébastien Goasguen built his first compute cluster while working on his PhD in the late ‘90s when they were still called Beowulf clusters; he’s been working on making computing a utility since then. He’s been focused on containers and container orchestration, creating a Kubernetes startup Skippbox where he created kompose, Cabin, and kubeless. Active in the serverless community, he cofounded TriggerMesh, a serverless management platform that builds on top of Kubernetes and Knative. He can be found hiking the Jura or at open source conferences. He’s the author of the Docker Cookbook and coauthor of the Kubernetes Cookbook.

Chen Goldberg is a technology leader with 20 years of experience leading engineering teams. She’s the engineering director at Google Cloud, where she leads the Anthos engineering team, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the OSS Kubernetes and Istio projects teams, helping development teams to increase their agility and modernize workloads. Her team is committed to enabling an open cloud and ensuring universal adoption of Kubernetes and Istio through ongoing community leadership and technical innovation with an emphasis on users’ needs. Chen lives in Sunnyvale, California, with her husband and three kids. Outside of work she enjoys hiking and making desserts.

Clare Gollnick is the director of data science at NS1, an industry-leading DNS and traffic management platform. An expert on statistical inference and machine learning, Clare writes and speaks often on the intersection of data, philosophy, and entrepreneurship. Previously, as chief technology officer of Terbium Labs, Clare led a diverse team of engineers and data scientists. Her team built innovate information security products, preventing fraud while still protecting consumer privacy. Clare has published a number of academic papers on information processing within neural networks, validation of new statistical methods, and the philosophy of science. Clare holds a PhD from Georgia Tech and a BS from UC Berkeley.

Lena Hall is a senior software engineer and developer advocate at Microsoft working on Azure, where she focuses on large-scale distributed systems and modern architectures. Lena has more than 10 years of experience in software engineering with a focus on distributed cloud programming, real-time system design, highly scalable and performant systems, big data analysis, data science, functional programming, and machine learning. Previously, she was a senior software engineer at Microsoft Research. She’s an elected member of the F# Software Foundation’s board of trustees, co-organizes a conference called ML4ALL, and is often an invited member of program committees for conferences like Kafka Summit, Lambda World, and others. Lena holds a master’s degree in computer science.

Everett Harper is the CEO and cofounder of Truss, which builds software and infrastructure to help companies scale and enterprises and public agencies modernize their digital services. Notable projects include Healthcare.gov, Nuna, and DOD Transcom. Previously, Everett worked at innovative companies in tech, such as Linden Lab (maker of Second Life), and in social impact, including Self-Help Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Everett started his career at Bain & Company, a top strategy consulting firm. He’s a board member of CARE.org and CASE at Duke Fuqua School of Business. He’s written for Forbes, Fortune, and TechCrunch and has been a featured speaker at Dent, Techstars, Dreamforce, and Women 2.0. Everett holds an MBA and MEd from Stanford University and a BSEE in biomedical engineering from Duke University, where he was an AB Duke Scholar. He won the NCAA National Championship in soccer and was inducted into the North Carolina Soccer Hall of Fame in 2019. Everett lives in Oakland, California, making limoncello when life hands him lemons.

Andrew Harvey is the CTO in residence in Sydney at Microsoft, where he helps startups of all sizes scale their products and technology. Previously, he was CTO at several startups, including the Apple Design Award-winning app Zova.

Steve Heffernan is the creator of Video.js, an open source web video player in use on over 1 million websites and with over 1 billion videos played per month. He’s currently leading product at Mux, building video performance monitoring and APIs for video streaming. Steve has been helping run the SF Video Tech Meetup and the Demuxed video engineering conference for the last five years.

James Heimbuck is the product manager for infrastructure at SendGrid, where he’s working with the company’s tech ops and internal tools teams to deliver platforms, products, and services to enable the delivery teams to create and deliver code for its 78,000 customers. Previously, he spent the last 14 years in B2B and B2C product management roles at companies such as Webroot, Bluprint (formerly Craftsy), and HomeAdvisor.

André Henry is a systems engineer at Venmo and a lifelong hacker. If you ever wondered who would try to install a supercomputer in an NYC apartment, you’ve thought about him. André lives at the intersection of lasers, cats, and tech. You can find him at a bookstore or conference, always learning and sharing.

Nivia S. Henry fundamentally believes that happy people, working in a healthy environment, will produce great outcomes. This is the philosophy behind her 15-plus-year career creating structures in which high-performing teams thrive. Today, Nivia plies her trade as an a manager of engineering managers at Spotify. Her career path has included nearly every role in tech, but her true passion is inspiring people to do their best work. Nivia has cochaired one of the largest tracks for Agile Alliance, organized meetups, and has spoken at conferences of all sizes. Her hobbies include being an overbearing mom to a gorgeous cat and traveling with her awesome husband, Andre. You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Patrick Higgins is a UI developer at Gremlin, where he helps developers unleash the power of controlled chaos. He’s passionate about finding effective ways to make UIs resilient to failure. He fills his weekends with playing soccer and music, reading, and assisting with civic causes that he cares about.

Daniel Hochman is a senior infrastructure engineer at Lyft. He’s passionate about scaling innovative products and processes to improve quality of life for those inside and outside of the company. During his time at Lyft, he has successfully guided the platform through an explosion of product and organizational growth. He wrote one of the highest-throughput microservices and introduced several critical storage technologies. Daniel most recently guided the rollout out of Envoy-Redis at Lyft which included a full on-the-fly replacement of Lyft’s high-throughput caching infrastructure. Daniel leads traffic networking at Lyft and is responsible for designing and implementing Lyft’s frontend infrastructure to scale for increasing numbers of diverse clients.

Lorin Hochstein is a senior software engineer on the cloud operations and reliability engineering (CORE) team at Netflix, where he works on ensuring that Netflix remains available. Previously, he was the senior software engineer at SendGrid, lead architect for cloud services at Nimbis Services, computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Lorin holds a BEng in computer engineering from McGill University, an MS in electrical engineering from Boston University, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland.

Jon Hodgson is the principal scientist for APM at Riverbed Technology. For over a decade, Jon has helped hundreds of organizations around the world optimize the reliability and performance of their mission-critical applications. With a background in data science, application architecture, systems administration, networking, and programming, Jon employs a multidisciplinary approach to troubleshooting, enabling him to analyze and solve some of the most challenging performance issues in complex modern environments. When he’s not obsessing about data visualization and making things perform faster, Jon enjoys digging things up with his tractor at his home in Missouri.

Thomas Jackson is the head of core and data infrastructure at Wish, where he’s responsible for online serving infrastructure (service discovery, container orchestration, databases, etc.). In his decade-plus of experience in information technology, he’s cultivated a specialty in high-performance, distributed, and reliable systems. Among his accomplishments, he was the founding member of the traffic SRE team at LinkedIn, where he built and scaled the company’s edge infrastructure.

Anil Jacob is a lead software engineer on the frontier scale team at Salesforce, where he works on large and complex customer implementations and related scale challenges. Previously, he was at Intuit, BEA WebLogic, and Wells Fargo. Anil’s interests are application scale, user experience, UX performance, and application development.

Nora Jones practices chaos engineering and human factors at Slack and is a student of human factors and systems safety at Lund University. She’s passionate about resilient software, people, and the intersection of those two worlds. She cowrote the book on chaos engineering with her teammates while working at Netflix and keynoted at AWS re:Invent in 2017 to an audience of over 40,000 people about the technical benefits and business case behind implementing chaos engineering.

Maya Kaczorowski is a product manager in security and privacy at Google, focused on container security. Previously, she worked on encryption at rest and encryption key management. She was also an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, working in IT security for large enterprises, and she completed her master’s in mathematics, focusing on cryptography and game theory. She’s bilingual in English and French. Outside of work, Maya is passionate about ice cream—making ice cream for friends at home, attending the Penn State Ice Cream Short Course in January 2014, and researching ice cream headaches. She also enjoys puzzling, running, and reading nonfiction.

Shobhit Kanaujia is an engineer at Facebook who specializes in full stack performance and efficiency at scale.

Michael Kehoe is a site reliability engineer at LinkedIn, where he specializes in building and maintaining 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.

Jessica Kerr is a developer at Atomist, where she makes development automation. She also podcasts on Greater Than Code and Arrested DevOps, and she speaks at software conferences around the world. Currently, she’s into resilience engineering, domain-driven design, and the practice of symmathesy: collaboration through mutual learning between us and the software we make.

Ryan Kitchens is a site reliability engineer on the CORE team at Netflix, where he works on building capacity across the organization to ensure its availability and reliability. Previously, Ryan was a founding member of the SRE team at Blizzard Entertainment.

Bridget Kromhout is a principal cloud 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, Minnesota. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at Bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Will Larson leads Stripe’s infrastructure engineering team, which provides the reliable, performant, and usable platforms and tools for Stripe’s engineers and users. At Stripe, he’s had the opportunity to be part of their development of Veneur and Sorbet and migrations to Kubernetes, Envoy, and Bazel, as well as providing the infrastructure for the launch of exciting new products like Terminal and Issuing. Previously, Will supported engineering teams at Uber and Digg.

Yoni Leibowitz is a software engineer on the Azure Data Explorer (Kusto) team, which he joined back when the service was still in an early stage of incubation. While being very hands on and focusing on the platform’s data engine, Yoni maintains a customer-obsessed state of mind, works closely with customers at all scales, and supports the growing community of users of the service and the Kusto query language.

Jenny Liao is a software engineer in Google’s Pittsburgh office. A Carnegie Mellon alumni, she has a healthy dose of Pittsburgh pride. Jenny is passionate about distributed systems design and is always excited to connect with more people. She enjoys painting, singing, and playing with dogs in her free time.

Beth Adele Long abandoned a potential career as a rocket scientist to tinker with websites. She’s currently a DevOps solutions strategist for New Relic and the project lead for New Relic’s collaboration with the SNAFUcatchers industry consortium. She’s obsessed with joint cognitive systems and good pens.

Laura Maguire studies human performance in high-risk, high-consequence work. As a researcher with the SNAFU Catchers Consortium, she has spent the last two years studying critical digital infrastructure and the teams tasked with keeping them running. She has a master’s degree in human factors and systems safety and is currently completing her PhD in cognitive systems engineering at the Ohio State University.

Charity Majors is the cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb, a startup that provides the first and (thus far) only observability solution for modern systems. She’s the coauthor of Database Reliability Engineering (the unicorn book) and previously worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab. She tests in prod.

Jonathan Maltz is a software engineer at Nuna, working to make high-quality, affordable healthcare available to every American. Previously, he was an Android developer and has progressively moved back the stack to his role at Nuna, where he builds backend applications and infrastructure. Along the way, he’s cultivated a love for fostering healthy communication between teams and their external stakeholders.

Heather Martin joined the cloud integration and automation team at Discover in November of 2016. Since then, her passion for cloud computing has grown from optimizing Discover’s private cloud, driving adoption of infrastructure as code to supporting efforts to expand and integrate into AWS. Heather leads an infrastructure as code public meetup and has started an internal meetup within Discover to help the technology organization drive its 2020 technology strategy. Heather has worked in IT for more than 15 years, spanning various infrastructure services roles and most recently expanding into leadership for more than five of them. She has an undergraduate degree in computer science and is currently pursuing her MBA from Lake Forest College. When not sharing her passion for cloud computing, Heather enjoys running and is a site coordinator for Girls on the Run (GOTR) and race director of an annual anti-human trafficking 5K.

Darren McCleary is a senior software engineer on the games team at the New York Times focused on building reliable distributed systems. He’s been a full-time Go developer since joining the company. He also sits on the Times’ Architecture Review Board, where he helps other teams design and build new systems.

Nikki McDonald is a content director at O’Reilly Media, where she writes, edits, and works with the industry’s leading practitioners to develop books, online courses, and training videos to help engineers and developers collaborate more effectively and create and deploy complex distributed systems. She also cochairs O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference, held annually in San Jose, New York, and London. 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.

Patrick Meenan is a software engineer at Facebook, where he’s helping make the web faster. Patrick has been working on web performance in one form or another for the last 25 years. Previously, he worked at Cloudflare and Google to make Chrome and the web faster. Patrick created the popular open source WebPageTest web performance measurement tool, runs the free instance of it at WebPagetest.org, and can frequently be found in the forums helping site owners understand and improve their website performance.

Russ Miles is CEO of ChaosIQ.io, where he and his team build commercial and open source products and provide services to companies applying chaos engineering to build confidence in the resilience of their production systems. Russ is an international consultant, trainer, speaker, and author. His most recent book, Antifragile Software: Building Adaptable Software with Microservices, explores how to apply chaos engineering to construct and manage complex, distributed systems in production with confidence.

Richard Moot (pronouns: he/him) is a developer evangelist at Square. He has a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. When he’s not programming, gaming, or reading, he’s probably just walking his dog.

Amanda Moran is a Bay Area-based developer advocate at DataStax. Her passion is bridging the gap between customers and engineering. Previously, she worked for HP, Lockheed Martin, Teradata, and Apache Trafodion startup Esgyn. Amanda’s an Apache Committer and member of the PMC for Apache Trafodion. She’s worked on customer POCs, executive demos, distributed database cloud deployments, Python coding, data science workshops, conferences, Linux/Hadoop administration, and scripting—a little bit of everything. She has a master’s degree in computer science from Santa Clara university and a BS in biology from the University of Washington. In her spare time, she loves running, hanging out with her dog, and finding reasons to go to Disneyland.

Oleksii Mykhailov is a senior SRE at Adobe and has been a key contributor to Adobe Advertising Cloud, which handles over 350 billions requests a day. Oleksii built the foundation of that large-scale infrastructure during hypergrowth and while driving key reliability initiatives.

Ryan Neal is head of infrastructure and part of the founding team at Netlify. Previously, he worked on the infrastructure team at Yelp and at Palantir in the Middle East. Ryan is based in San Francisco. He loves big data, fire spinning, and his golden retriever.

Jose Nino is the lead for core server networking group at Lyft. Jose has been instrumental in creating systems to scale Lyft’s Envoy production environment for increasingly large deployments and engineering orgs. He’s worked as an open source Envoy maintainer and has nurtured Envoy’s growing community. Recently, Jose has moved on to scaling Lyft’s network load tolerance systems. Jose has spoken about Envoy and other related topics at several venues, most recently at KubeCon EU 2018 and at the main stage at KubeCon NA 2018.

Kris Nova is independent, focusing on containers, infrastructure, and Kubernetes, and she’s an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Previously, she was a developer advocate and an engineer on Kubernetes at Heptio. Kris has a deep technical background in the Go programming language and has authored many successful open source tools in Go. She’s a Kubernetes maintainer and the creator of kubicorn, a successful Kubernetes infrastructure management tool. Kris organizes a special interest group in Kubernetes and is a leader in the community. She understands the grievances with running cloud native infrastructure via a distributed cloud native application and recently authored an O’Reilly book on the topic, Cloud Native Infrastructure. Kris lives in Seattle and spends her free time climbing mountains.

Renee Orser is the vice president of engineering at NS1, where she oversees all delivery and operations of NS1’s engineering organization. Renee brings deep expertise in facilitation, cross-functional communication, and brash problem solving to NS1’s teams. Previously, Renee spent a decade working and traveling in over 30 countries while managing teams delivering distributed, highly scalable digital healthcare products to governments and international nonprofits; her roles included senior program manager at ThoughtWorks, analyst at Partners In Health, and independent consultant. She holds a BA in international relations and Arabic from Tufts University.

Jérôme Petazzoni is a DevOps advocate and international speaker. He was born and raised in France, where he worked on geographic information systems, voice over IP, video streaming, and encoding and started a cloud hosting company back when EC2 wasn’t an Amazon product yet. In California he built and scaled the dotCloud PaaS, which eventually gave birth to Docker. While at Docker, he represented the company at hundreds of conferences and events and trained thousands of engineers to use Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes. He’s fluent in many languages (mostly programming ones), owns a dozen musical instruments, and can play the theme of Zelda on most of them.

Neil Peterson is a senior content engineer at Microsoft, where he delivers technical documentation and samples with a focus on Azure and containers. A data center and cloud enthusiast, Neil has 15 years’ experience in large data center deployment, management, and maintenance operations.

Will Pressly is senior director of emerging business at Verizon Digital Media Services. Will has worked on the company’s engineering team in several capacities over the past 7+ years and brings with him a variety of technical experience.

Alex Qin is out here trying get free. She cares about helping people fulfill the radical visions they have for themselves and the world while working towards more just and equitable futures. She has experience writing code, leading engineering teams, growing communities, developing education programs, teaching, and advocating for underrepresented people in tech. These days, she spends her time learning, healing, giving love, and growing the Code Cooperative, a community of people who use and build technology to create life-changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.

Bob Quillin is vice president of developer relations at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), where he leads OCI developer relations, advocacy, engagement, and lighthouse adoption. Bob has focused his career on applying automation to simplify complex cloud, IT, and developer challenges. He joined Oracle as part of its 2015 acquisition of StackEngine, an early container-native pioneer building services and platforms designed to help developers and DevOps teams build, orchestrate, and scale enterprise-grade container apps, where he was cofounder and CEO. Previously, Bob was CEO of Austin-based cloud monitoring SaaS startup CopperEgg (acquired by IDERA in 2013) and held executive and startup leadership roles at nLayers, EMC, and VMware.

Rajesh Raman is a software engineer at SingalFx, where he works on the SignalFlow streaming analytics engine, developing novel ways to handle real-time, distributed computation of streaming time series data. Rajesh has over 15 years’ experience working in large-scale distributed systems capacity management and service monitoring at companies such as Facebook and Google. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, where his focus (and thesis) centered on distributed resource management for high throughput computing.

Shraya Ramani is a Los Angeles-based security infrastructure software engineer at BuzzFeed with extensive experience with Golang. Previously, she worked at MongoDB as a software engineer on the server tools team. When she isn’t obsessing about tests, she enjoys learning about the ocean and octopuses.

Alex Rasmussen is a data engineering consultant. Previously, he was VP of engineering at Freenome, an AI genomics company, and an early employee at Trifacta, a pioneer in the data wrangling space. He holds a PhD from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where his dissertation focused on highly efficient large-scale data processing systems. While at UCSD, he led the TritonSort project, which set several world records in large-scale sorting.

Isobel Redelmeier works on open source software at LightStep, where she focuses on OpenTracing and other observability solutions to improve performance management across distributed systems. She learned firsthand how difficult, and how valuable, observability can be when working at Pivotal, where she pushed code in about 10 languages to different production systems while working with Pivotal Labs. She later focused on security in Cloud Foundry.

Liz Rice is the technology evangelist at container security specialists Aqua Security and coauthor of the O’Reilly report Kubernetes Security. She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from her years spent working on network protocols and distributed systems and in digital technology sectors such as video on demand (VOD), music, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). When not building startups and writing code, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London or racing in virtual reality on Zwift.

Jeremy Rickard is a software engineer on the Azure container compute team working remotely in Colorado. He works on a number of open source projects, including Virtual Kubelet, Open Service Broker for Azure, service catalog, and Cloud Native Application Bundle tooling. Previously, he worked at VMware and helped build infrastructure and services that support VMware Cloud Services and built services using Spring, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes.

Aaron Rinehart has been expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering in its application to other safety-critical portions of the domain, notably cybersecurity. He pioneered the application of security in chaos engineering during his tenure as the chief security architect at UnitedHealth Group (UHG), the largest private healthcare company in the world. While at UHG, Aaron released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open source tools focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. A frequent author, consultant, and speaker, Aaron also recently founded the first chaos engineering meetup in Washington, DC.

Sasha Rosenbaum is a program manager on the Azure DevOps engineering team, focused on improving the alignment of the product with open source software. She’s a co-organizer of the DevOpsDays Chicago conference and recently published a book on serverless computing in Azure with .NET.

Christian Saide is a DevOps engineer at NS1, where he has been a key player in automating, hardening, and scaling out its systems, particularly by pushing more and more of its infrastructure into container-based architectures and implementing solutions to the tough problems surrounding global distribution. He also served a critical role in NS1’s move to software-defined networking and authored the primary software-defined networking device and network topology. Christian has been working in the technology sector for five years, focusing on networking and distributed systems. Previously, he was at Industrial Color Software, where he climbed from a midlevel software developer to director of development operations and was instrumental in taking the company’s aging infrastructure from a handful of bare-metal servers to multiple virtualization hosts running hundreds of virtual machines, which in turn supported hundreds of containers.

Osman Sarood leads the infrastructure team at Mist Systems, where he helps Mist scale the Mist Cloud in a cost-effective and reliable manner. Osman has published more than 20 research papers in highly rated journals, conferences, and workshops and has presented his research at several academic conferences. He has over 400 citations along with an i10-index and h-index of 12. Previously, he was a software engineer at Yelp, where he prototyped, architected, and implemented several key production systems and architected and authored Yelp’s autoscaled spot infrastructure, fleet_miser. Osman holds a PhD in high-performance computing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he focused on load balancing and fault tolerance.

Aaron is a developer advocate at Microsoft Azure and a core maintainer of the Athens Project. Before Athens, he was a core maintainer and chair of the Kubernetes SIG-Service-Catalog and a contributor to various other projects in the Kubernetes community.

He has 15+ years of software engineering experience ranging from frontend design to distributed data systems. He discovered Go around 2013 and Kubernetes in 2015 and hasn’t looked back. He lives in Portland, OR where he and his wife love to run up and down mountains together.

Gwen Shapira is a system architect at Confluent, where she helps customers achieve success with their Apache Kafka implementations. She has 15 years of experience working with code and customers to build scalable data architectures, integrating relational and big data technologies. Gwen currently specializes in building real-time reliable data processing pipelines using Apache Kafka. Gwen is an Oracle Ace Director, the coauthor of Hadoop Application Architectures, and a frequent presenter at industry conferences. She is also a committer on Apache Kafka and Apache Sqoop. When Gwen isn’t coding or building data pipelines, you can find her pedaling her bike, exploring the roads and trails of California and beyond.

Priyanka Sharma is the director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab, the only cloud-agnostic single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. Priyanka has worked on several Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, with her deepest expertise being the OpenTracing standard. She’s worked on Jaeger tracing and Vitess and given talks on Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE)/SPIRE. A former entrepreneur with a passion for building developer products and growing them through open source communities, Priyanka advises startups at HeavyBit Industries, an accelerator for developer products. She holds a BA in political science from Stanford University.

Marcelo Soares is a senior IT manager at Dell leading the application performance management organization globally. With 21 years of IT industry experience across multiple IT verticals, covering a wide range of disciplines from IT operations and support to testing and quality and also leading development delivery organizations.

Ines Sombra is director of engineering 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, she was a data engineer.

Dimitri Stiliadis is the cofounder and CTO of Aporeto. He comes from a multidisciplinary background in distributed systems, security, and networking and is the inventor of several groundbreaking technologies in these areas. Previously, he was the cofounder and CTO of Nuage Networks, where he led the development of the industry-leading Virtualized Services Platform. He’s held several leading roles in Bell Labs Research, where he led a series of research programs with fundamental contributions in networking, algorithms, optical networks, and distributed systems.

Jeremy Tupa is an application performance management consultant at Dell. His 20-year career has spanned application development and architecture, service operations, and performance management. Over the years, Jeremy has lent his expertise to a variety of apps across the Dell portfolio, including Dell.com, mobility, services, manufacturing, corporate finance, and HR. When he’s not wearing his cape as a performance superhero for Dell, Jeremy can be found out in the wild camping with his son or playing soccer or video games.

James Turnbull is VPE at Glitch. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of a number of books about open source software. Previously, he was a CTO in residence at Microsoft, founder and chief technology officer 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.

Carolyn Van Slyck is a software developer based in the wilds of suburban Chicago, working remotely on the Microsoft cloud native team. Her passion is developer tools and building vibrant inclusive open source communities around them. She’s a maintainer for the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) Spec, Duffle, and Porter, Kubernetes service catalog, and the GoMods Athens Proxy. Carolyn runs Women Who Go and organizes for the Chicago chapters of Women Who Go and Write/Speak/Code. In between code reviews, Carolyn hauls her cookies around the world to share her love of open source, containers, and excessive emoji.

Seth Vargo is an engineer at Google Cloud. Previously he worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and some Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. When he is not writing, working on open source, teaching, or speaking at conferences, Seth advises non-profits.

John Voorhees is the founder and CEO of Primitive, where he and his team are working to transform the practice of software development through the power of data visualization in virtual reality (VR). VR has the potential to revolutionize software development by offering a new medium that fundamentally changes the way that teams interact with code. The company’s goal is to create a development environment that immerses a team in interactive 3D representations of complex software, allowing for an unprecedented look at code. John is a computer-aided design (CAD) engineer by training. As a self-taught programmer, John understands the challenge of learning to code. One of the main reasons he started Primitive was from a desire to create a programming interface that was similar to the kinds of tools he had used in CAD.

Heidi Waterhouse is a developer advocate with LaunchDarkly. She delights in working at the intersection of usability, risk reduction, and cutting-edge technology. One of her favorite hobbies is talking to developers about things they already knew but had never thought of that way before. She sews all her conference dresses so that she’s sure there is a pocket for the mic.

Shannon Weyrick is vice president of architecture at NS1. A 20-year veteran of internet infrastructure, Shannon is an accomplished technical architect, developer, and leader whose experience encompasses both development and operations of globally distributed platforms. Previously, Shannon worked at INAP and F5. A regular open source contributor, he has led and worked on a wide range of infrastructure projects from high-performance servers to novel programming languages and runtimes, and he enjoys writing and speaking at industry conferences.

Richard Whitehead is chief evangelist at Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter and is responsible for the successful introduction of products and technologies to the market. Previously, Richard was a consultant at JRW Strategies, where he provided product strategy, new market introduction, and competitive analysis advice to the software industry. Richard is the cochair of the monitoring and analytics working group at ONUG.

Phillip Wittrock is staff software engineer at Google, a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, and a Kubernetes SIG CLI technical lead. Phillip’s hobbies include debating how kubectl is pronounced and talking about Kubernetes at social events.

April C. Wright is a hacker, O’Reilly author, teacher, and community leader who has been breaking, making, fixing, and defending the security of global critical communications and connections for over 25 years. She’s an international speaker and trainer, educating and advising on matters of privacy and information security with the goal of safeguarding the digital components we rely on every day. April has held roles on defensive, operational, adversarial, and development teams throughout her career, and she has spoken and contributed to numerous worldwide security conferences including BlackHat, DEF CON USA and DEF CON China, DerbyCon, Hack in Paris, DefCamp Romania, and ITWeb South Africa as well as for the US government and industry organizations such as OWASP and ISSA. She has started multiple small businesses, including a nonprofit, handles communications for DEF CON Groups community outreach, and in 2017 cofounded a popular local Boston community event (DC617). April has collected dozens of certifications to add capital letters at the end of her name and almost died in Dracula’s secret staircase. She once read in the Onion that researchers at the University of North Carolina released a comprehensive report in 2014 confirming her status as the “most significant and interesting person currently inhabiting the earth,” and it was on “teh internet,” so it must be true.

Ruth Yakubu is a senior cloud developer advocate at Microsoft and founder of PoshBeauty.com. She specializes in Java, cloud, advanced analytics, data platforms, and AI. She’s a tech speaker at conferences like Devoxx, JavaWithBest, DeveloperWeek, TechSummit, TechInProto, and LambdaWorld as well as events for developer communities. She’s worked for great companies like Unisys, Accenture, and DIRECTV over the years, gaining a lot of experience with software architectural design and programming. She was awarded the Dzone Most Valued Blogger.

Christine Yen is the cofounder of Honeycomb, a startup with a new approach to observability and debugging systems with data. Christine has built systems and products at companies large and small and likes to have her fingers in as many pies as possible. Previously, she built Parse’s analytics product (and leveraged Facebook’s data systems to expand it) and wrote software at a few now-defunct startups.