What's the best way to break into DevOps as a career? Follow these leaders. As the DevOps movement continues to make headway into the enterprise, TechBeacon has updated our "DevOps 100" list of IT leaders who are driving those changes. This year we partnered with IT Revolution and the DevOps Enterprise Summit programming committee to identify the 100 practitioners to follow on Twitter.
We've added many new names, as well as many new accomplishments for DevOps experts who appeared in last year's listing. We've also broken up the list into a few new categories we think you'll find helpful no matter what your and DevOps role.
The biggest category, authors, includes links to books that these experts have recently published or that continue to influence DevOps practices. Other categories include: cloud and containers, monitoring and reliability, agile and testing, open source, security, architecture, continuous integration/continuous delivery, and general DevOps.
Many on this list of 100 experts fall into multiple categories. We have plugged them into the the category where they're making the greatest contribution. Many of these seasoned experts are speaking at the annual DevOps Enterprise Summit —you can meet them there.
Authors
John Allspaw
Co-founder, Adaptive Capacity Labs
An engineering leader and researcher, Allspaw creates and leads teams engaged in software and systems engineering. He is perhaps best known for his tenure as CTO of Etsy and as an engineering manager at Flickr. Allspaw gave a seminal talk about DevOps (just before the term was coined) with Paul Hammond at Velocity 2009, titled "10 Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr." He's also the author of the books Web Operations (with Jesse Robbins) and The Art of Capacity Planning.
[ Special Coverage: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2019 ]
Charles Betz
Principal analyst, Forrester
Betz serves as Forrester's global DevOps lead for infrastructure and operations professionals, helping build next-generation operation models for digital organizations. He is an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas, teaching an IT delivery course in the software engineering and information system program. Betz is the author of a textbook on IT management written from an agile and lean IT perspective, Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children, and he is co-author of Run Grow Transform: Integrating Business and Lean IT.
Vicky Brasseur
Director of open-source strategy, Juniper Networks
At Juniper, Brasseur provides strategic consulting services to help companies understand, use, release, and contribute to free and open-source software in ways that are good for their bottom line while also being good for the free/open-source communities. She has served as the vice president of the open-source initiative and as a senior engineering manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Published under the name VM Brasseur, her book, Forge Your Future with Open Source, addresses "what open source is, where it came from, and why it's important," and is written so even folks without programming experience can understand the principles involved.
Daniel Bryant
Independent technical consultant, Datawire
Bryant specializes in continuous delivery through identifying value streams, creating build pipelines, and implementing effective testing strategies. His technical expertise is in DevOps tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice architecture. He is a Java champion; contributes to several open-source projects; writes for InfoQ, O'Reilly, and Voxxed; and runs his own consulting firm, Big Picture Tech. He's the co-author, with Abraham Marin-Perez, of the book Continuous Delivery in Java.
Katrina Clokie
Test practice manager, BNZ
Clokie, based in New Zealand, is an active contributor to the international testing community, and she is an accomplished and experienced IT leader. She's also the founder and editor of Testing Trapeze magazine, a co-founder of the WeTest New Zealand conference, and the author of A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps.
Cornelia Davis
VP, technology, Pivotal Software
Davis is a business leader focusing on emerging technology. She has become an expert in helping businesses optimize technical strategies to optimize business outcomes. Her book, Cloud Native Patterns, guides users "through the dynamic world of the distributed cloud." She serves in multiple capacities at Pivotal Software, and she has also worked at EMC and eRoom Technology.
Patrick Debois
Independent IT consultant
Some credit Debois with creating the concept of DevOps (and he still advocates spelling it "Devops"). He's an independent IT consultant—a developer, manager, sysadmin, and tester. He bridges the gap between projects and operations by using agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. In 2009 he organized the first DevOpsDays, and he’s since been promoting DevOps as a way to exchange ideas between these groups and show how they can help each other to achieve better results in business. He recently co-wrote The DevOps Handbook.
Dominica DeGrandis
Director of digital transformation, Tasktop
DeGrandis is perhaps the IT industry’s leading expert in Kanban flow. She focuses on helping IT teams optimize workflows to produce the best result throughout the value stream. DeGrandis believes that visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations reveal mutually critical information. She is the author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work and Flow.
DeGrandis will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Dr. Nicole Forsgren
DevOps research and strategy, Google Cloud
Forsgren is an "IT impacts expert" best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. Forsgren says she likes to "rub science on things." Accordingly, she believes in using metrics to make software better. She's been named a Top 10 Thought Leader in DevOps, a Top 100 Leader, and a Top 20 Most Influential Woman in DevOps. She was also the lead author of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, with Jez Humble and Gene Kim.
Forsgren will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Camille Fournier
Managing director, Two Sigma
Fournier serves as the head of platform engineering at Two Sigma, responsible for managing the software platform infrastructure and frameworks. She is the author of The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change.
Emily Freeman
Senior cloud advocate, Microsoft
In addition to her work at Microsoft, Freeman is the author of the recently published DevOps for Dummies. She aims to take a "creative approach to identifying and solving the human challenges of engineering" and believes the key to creating successful tech is to have a thriving company culture.
Jayne Groll
CEO, DevOps Institute
Groll is CEO of the DevOps Institute (DOI), the premier source for DevOps training and certification services for enterprise IT. The institute is led by a board of regents who oversee the DOI's offerings, to codify and promote DevOps' best practices and standards, and to help enterprise IT deliver more value faster to their customers. At the DOI, Groll focuses on establishing a global learning community that's based around emerging DevOps practices and the SKIL Framework. She is also president of the ITSM Academy and is the author of the Agile Service Management Guide.
Jason Hand
DevOps and CloudOps advocate, Microsoft
Hand is well known as the public face of VictorOps, and is currently serving as VictorOps' evangelist for DevOps in addition to his Microsoft role. He dedicates himself to sharing lessons learned, and helps teams continuously improve their IT and software development practices. Named "DevOps Evangelist of the Year" by DevOps.com in 2016, Hand has written several books: ChatOps for Dummies, ChatOps: Managing Operations in Group Chat, and Post-Incident Reviews: Learning from Failure for Improved Incident Response.
Mirco Hering
Global DevOps practice lead, Accenture
Hering is a blogger, author, and managing director for Accenture's global DevOps practice and the agile practice in Asia Pacific. His focus is agile and DevOps transformations. Before DevOps was a thing, he was working on accelerating software delivery through innovative approaches, experimenting with agile methods while supporting major public- and private-sector organizations in their search for efficient IT delivery. He is the author of DevOps for the Modern Enterprise. Check out his blog also.
Jez Humble
Software researcher and global DevOps expert
Humble is an award-winning author and software researcher who has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in organizations of varying sizes. He's worked across three continents, most recently for the US government at 18F. He teaches at UC Berkeley, and is the founder and CTO of DevOps Research and Assessment LLC. He is co-author of the book Continuous Delivery, as well as Lean Enterprise and The DevOps Handbook. He's been a keynote speaker at the biggest agile and DevOps conferences around the world.
Nora Jones
Head, chaos engineering and human factors, Slack
Jones' résumé reads like a Who's Who of tech giants, with leadership roles at Netflix and Jet.com before Slack. With a passion for both people and reliable software, Jones is a rising star in the world of tech as well as the co-author of Chaos Engineering, which grew from her and her co-authors' experiences at Netflix.
Dr. Mik Kersten
CEO, Tasktop Technologies
Kersten currently serves as the creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open-source project, in addition to his role at Tasktop. With a PhD in computer science, Kersten has held a variety of leadership positions, including research scientist at PARC and a senior developer at Intentional Software Corporation. Kersten serves on the Eclipse board of directors as well as the architecture and planning councils. He was voted a JavaOne Rock Star speaker in both 2008 and 2009, and is the author of last year's Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework.
Kersten will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Gene Kim
Researcher, speaker, DevOps expert
For many of you, Kim needs no introduction. He's an author, researcher, speaker, director, and DevOps enthusiast. As an author, Kim gained considerable attention when his book The Phoenix Project, a fictionalized account of a rescued IT initiative, became a best-seller within the IT industry. Before that he published The Visible Ops Handbook, and he has since written Beyond the Phoenix Project and co-written The DevOps Handbook. He is now a highly sought-after speaker for DevOps conferences, and he has a new title coming this fall as a follow-up to The Phoenix Project called The Unicorn Project.
Kim will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Thomas Limoncelli
SRE manager, Stack Overflow
After a seven-year stint at Google, Limoncelli is currently at Stack Overflow. He is the writer of the "Everything Sysadmin" column in ACM Queue Magazine. He is the author of Time Management for System Administrators, and co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration and The Practice of Cloud System Administration.
Troy Magennis
Founder, Focused Objective
Focused Objective is an organization focused on software development modeling and probabilistic forecasting consulting. Having consulted for enterprise clients such as Walmart, Siemens, Skype, and Microsoft, Magennis is an expert in helping companies of all sizes and verticals implement agile best practices. Magennis is a frequent conference presenter and the author of Forecasting and Simulating Software Development Projects, as well as LINQ to Objects Using C# 4.0: Using and Extending LINQ to Objects and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).
Magennis will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Michael Nygard
VP, enterprise architecture, Sabre
Nygard has held positions including as the VP of customer solutions at Cognitect, Inc. and technical director at Verizon Business, leading the Innovation Incubator in the Verizon Global Services Division. Nygard is the author of Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software, and he is a frequent conference presenter.
Manuel Pais
DevOps, continuous delivery consultant
Pais has made the rounds as a speaker at DevOps and IT conferences around the world. He is co-author of the book Team Guide to Software Releaseability and has an extensive background as a Java developer and build manager. He is also the co-author of the new book Team Topologies.
Pais will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Casey Rosenthal
CEO and co-founder, Verica
Rosenthal is focused on helping teams tackle big data and build solutions that can conquer difficult problems. A veteran of the conference circuit, Rosenthal has spoken at AWS re:Invent and QConSF16 and been the keynote speaker at several other events. With Nora Jones, he co-wrote the book Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice.
Mark Schwartz
Enterprise strategist for AWS
Schwartz calls himself "an iconoclast, a CIO, a playful crafter of ideas, and an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose." (We had to look that one up.) Schwartz says he advises some of the world’s largest companies on the obvious: "Time to move to the cloud, guys." He’s done cool, people-oriented things, too, like using business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. He has written The Art of Business Value, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, and War and Peace and IT.
Schwartz will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Matthew Skelton
Head of consulting, Conflux Digital
Skelton has been building, deploying, and operating commercial software systems since 1998, specializing in continuous delivery and operability for software. Industries include manufacturing, e-commerce, and online services, embracing cloud, IoT, and embedded software. He curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET and Team Guide to Software Operability. Skelton also is the co-author of the new book Team Topologies.
Skelton will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
James Turnbull
CTO, Hyperflow.tv
Turnbull is an Australian author who writes about free software and open source, a security specialist, and a software developer. He has held a number of leadership positions with some of the major companies in tech, including CTO at Microsoft for Startups, VP of services at Docker, CTO and founder of Empatico, CTO at Kickstarter, and VP of engineering at Venmo. A frequent speaker on the conference circuit, Turnbull is author of numerous books, including The Docker Book, The Art of Monitoring, and The Logstash Book.
John Willis
VP, DevOps and digital practices, SJ Technologies
Having worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years, Willis was formerly director of ecosystem development at Docker. He also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, and he has written six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management. Willis most recently co-wrote The DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project. Check out his video discussion about "Beyond the Phoenix Project."
Willis will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Security
Maya Kaczorowski
Product manager, Google
In addition her day job, Kaczorowski is a security and privacy whiz with a focus on container security. She has held various roles at McKinsey & Company and is passionate about IT security, cloud computing, and machine learning.
Caitie McCaffrey
Principal software engineering lead, Azure Sphere security services, Microsoft
Featured in DarkReading's July 2018 "10 More Women in Security You May Not Know But Should,” McCaffery also worked as the tech lead for the observability team at Twitter. Having built large-scale services and systems for the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO, she partnered with the eXtreme Computing Group in Microsoft Research to productionize Orleans as part of rewriting the Halo Services. McCaffrey is a sought-after conference speaker who has done many sessions and some keynotes over the past several years.
Mark Miller
Senior storyteller, DevSecOps community advocate, Sonatype
As co-founder and executive producer at All Day DevOps, Miller helps lead one of the world's largest DevOps conferences, with over 100 sessions and more than 30,000 attendees. Miller also serves as the editor in chief of LinkedIn's DevOps community, with over 61,000 members.
Alan Shimel
Founder and CEO, MediaOps
Shimel calls MediaOps his "best adventure yet. ... We are the people behind DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Container Journal, Digital Anarchist, co-founders of the DevOps Institute and more." He's also a managing partner at the CISO Group. Shimel hosts podcasts and writes on DevOps.com. He is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events.
Kelly Shortridge
VP, product strategy, Capsule8
Shortridge has held a variety of leadership positions, including as product manager for SecurityScorecard, detection product manager at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, and co-founder of IperLane. She researches the application of behavioral economics on information security, about which she's spoken at conferences internationally, including Black Hat, AusCERT, Hacktivity, Troopers, and ZeroNights. Most recently, Shortridge was the product manager for analytics at SecurityScorecard. She served as an investment banking analyst at Teneo Capital, covering the data security and analytics sectors.
James Wickett
Senior security engineer and developer advocate, Verica
In addition to his roles at Verica, Wickett writes about DevOps and DevSecOps at LinkedIn Learning. He has written or co-written five courses about DevOps for Lynda.com and has held various technical roles at National Instruments, Mentor Graphics, and Signal Sciences Corporation.
Cloud and containers
Adrian Cockroft
VP, cloud architecture strategy, AWS
Cockcroft has held various leadership roles, including as a technology fellow at Battery Ventures, cloud architect and director of engineering at Netflix, and distinguished engineer at eBay. With a long career at the leading edge of technology, Cockroft is an expert in scalable personalization algorithms, cloud and web services APIs, and more.
Ian Coldwater
DevSecOps engineer, Heroku
Coldwater is a Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native infrastructure expert. Ian is a frequent speaker at tech events around the country and tweets about all things containers, security, and life.
Jessica Deen
Senior cloud advocate, Microsoft
Deen is a member of LoECDA: The League of Extraordinary Cloud DevOps Advocates. In 2013, she received her FEMA certification from the U.S Department of Homeland Security, which recognizes leadership and influence abilities during times of crisis and emergency. Deen worked in IT consulting and systems administration for more than 10 years before moving to Microsoft. She is a frequent speaker at operations conferences and holds many IT certifications.
Jessica DeVita
Senior product manager, Azure site reliability engineering, Microsoft
DeVita has more than 20 years of IT experience in a variety of industries, including medical devices, entertainment, enterprise software, and cloud computing. DeVita has also worked as tech evangelist at Chef Software and a systems administrator at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Bridget Kromhout
Principal cloud developer advocate, Microsoft
Kromhout has moved beyond her earlier academic interest in theory to deal with, as she puts it, "the concrete (if 'cloud' can be considered tangible)." After 15 years as an operations engineer, she is now a frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences. She leads the DevOpsDays organization globally and the DevOps community in Minneapolis. She focuses on Kubernetes, cloud computing, and other operations-related topics.
Ashley McNamara
Software engineer and developer advocate, Microsoft Azure
McNamara is a contributor in the Linux and Go communities. She worked for Rackspace and Pivotal before landing on Microsoft's Azure team, where she describes her role as "a bridge between third-party developers and Microsoft, driving platform adoption through the developer community and driving change into products based on real world customer / developer feedback." In her spare time, McNamara mentors at WeWork, General Assembly, AngelHack, and CapitalFactory. She's also on the board of multiple engineering groups, including Redis Austin, Big Data Analytics Club, and Austin All Girl Hack Night.
Corey Quinn
Cloud economist, The Duckbill Group
Quinn specializes in helping clients assess and lower their AWS cloud costs. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" podcast, and he curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news.
Quinn will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Ines Sombra
Senior director of engineering, distributed systems, Fastly
Sombra has also worked as the lead data engineer for Engine Yard and as a web consultant for Arthur J. Gallagher. Sombra serves as chair for the Velocity conference, a leading cloud-native systems and DevOps/SRE confab.
Kelly Sommers
Windows Azure and DataStax expert
Sommers is a four-time Windows Azure MVP and a former two-time DataStax MVP for Apache Cassandra. She is one of the most followed and influential voices in the DevOps space. Just weeks ago, she "kicked off a contentious discussion of what cloud providers like AWS 'owe' to the open source code they monetize," a debate that was covered in TechRepublic.
Abel Wang
Senior cloud developer advocate and DevOps lead, The League of Extraordinary Cloud DevOps Advocates
Wang specializes in DevOps and Azure, with a background in application development. He spent seven years with Notion Solutions as a process consultant and a certified Scrum master. He has presented at Global DevOps Bootcamp, Advanced DevOps, BRK2058, and more. In addition to being a DevOps and coding guru, Wang is a guitar aficionado.
Agile and testing
Em Campbell-Pretty
Managing director, Pretty Agile
Campbell-Pretty currently works at Pretty Agile, a boutique consulting and training company focused on helping organizations achieve business agility leveraging the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and Tribal Unity. She has held a variety of leadership and tech roles, including as a partner at Context Matters, as a SAFe implementation consultant at Westpac Group, and as the SAFe program portfolio management consultant at the Australian Taxation Office. Campbell-Pretty was one of the first people in the world to be invited to become a SAFe Fellow, a level of certification held by only 16 people globally.
Martin Fowler
Chief scientist, ThoughtWorks
Fowler calls himself "a general loud mouth on software development" and, no doubt, he has every right to be. As one of the original signatories to the Agile Manifesto, he has been a thoughtful contributor to software development methodologies for more than two decades, seeing beyond waterfall development processes, past UP/RUP, and onto agile methods from their infancy. You should regularly consult his blog.
Alice Goldfuss
Container security expert, GitHub
On her LinkedIn page Goldfuss says she’s "very good with computers." That just might be an understatement. She's a Kanban advocate at Edgelord for getting stuff crossed off that pesky to-do list. Having built her engineering career at New Relic, Goldfuss now works as a "kernel crasher" at GitHub; she's helping it run its cutting-edge container platform. She has consulted on several books (Docker: Up & Running, Effective DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering vol. 2), presented at several major conferences (SREcon, Velocity, Container Summit), and helped organize a few of them as well (LISA17 and DevOps Days Portland).
Elisabeth Hendrickson
VP, product management and engineering research and development, Pivotal GemFire
Hendrickson has worked as a tester, developer, writer, and agile enabler at Sybase, Aveo, and now Pivotal. In addition to GemFire, she also oversees Pivotal's associated Cloud Cache product. She's a frequent speaker at agile, testing, and DevOps conferences, currently focused on topics including extreme programming, exploratory testing, and continuous delivery.
Liz Keogh
Lean and agile consultant, Lunivore
Keogh has specialized in Cynefin, behavior-driven development, and putting agile into context. She is a leadership/agile coach trainer, and she has worked as a fellow and council member at the Lean Systems Society, as well as lead developer at JBehave and in various technical roles at ThoughtWorks.
Dr. Steve Mayner
SAFe Fellow and principal consultant, Scaled Agile
Mayner has more than 30 years of experience in a variety of technical roles. He has also worked as the VP of software and systems development for CSRA and as a division head at InfoReliance. Mayner also has extensive experience as a thought leader, speaker, coach, consultant, and trainer.
Mayner will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Jon Smart
Partner and business agility lead, Deloitte
Smart is laser-focused on helping organizations across a variety of industries deliver better value, sooner. He has held leadership roles at Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank and has over 25 years of experience in taking an agile approach to change. Smart has spoken at dozens of conferences and was a member of the "Best Internal Agile Team," as named at the Agile Awards 2016.
Smart will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Daniel Terhorst-North
Independent consultant, expert in lean and agile methods
Terhorst-North is an expert in lean and agile methods, as well as in organizational design and transformation. He started his own consultancy in 2012, and prior to that was a lean technology specialist at DRW Trading Group and the principal consultant at ThoughtWorks. Terhourst-North focuses on helping businesses accelerate their software pipelines by combining lean practices, DevOps, strategic coaching, and more to create better efficiencies and move more quickly.
Julia Wester
Co-founder and principal consultant, 55 Degrees
An expert in lean and agile practices, Wester has held tech roles from entry-level to senior management. These include six years managing web development teams at F5 Networks and TBS, followed by three years at LeanKit, training, consulting, and managing the customer education team. She also runs the website EverydayKanban.com.
Monitoring and reliability
Jason Cox
Director, platform and systems reliability engineering, The Walt Disney Company
Cox has succeeded in bringing DevOps practices to Disney's Internet group, along with benefits such as faster deploy times. He is a passionate advocate of DevOps practices, including collaboration, curiosity, automation, agile, and lean methods. He enjoys writing about leadership and DevOps topics. He is the author of iCurlHTTP, an iOS app for those who want to cURL on the go. Cox continues to support the Disney-branded businesses (studios, parks, interactive, consumer products, stores) and speaks at events, including the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Cox will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
John Cutler
Product evangelist, Amplitude
Cutler is an expert in product development. His past roles include senior product manager of search at Zendesk, senior product manager at Pends.io, and user experience researcher at AppFolio.
Cutler will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Julia Evans
Software engineer and writer, Strip
While her title is software engineer, Evans does it all: networking, site reliability/monitoring, database management, kernel hacking, and container orchestration. Fans of her Twitter account should also read her blog, which has great introductions to many operations-related topics that are considered difficult by newcomers.
Liz Fong-Jones
Principal developer advocate, Honeycomb.io
Fong-Jones makes "developers, operators, and workers as a whole more productive and empowered." She is a developer advocate, a labor and ethics organizer, and a site reliability engineer (SRE) with over 15 years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb.io for the SRE and Observability communities, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
Charity Majors
Engineer and co-founder, Honeycomb.io
Majors says in her Twitter profile, "I test in production, and so do you." No doubt, that sort of honesty is why she has nearly 40,000 Twitter followers. Recently she tweeted: "It always shocks me to learn that people I don't know are reading my tweets; in my mind I'm still writing for my twenty friends." As one of the best-known operations engineers and founders in Silicon Valley, Majors built her renown at Parse and Facebook, then co-founded Honeycomb, a monitoring/observability service. She offers up engrossing articles at charity.wtf and honeycomb.io/blog.
Jennifer Petoff
Global program manager, Google site reliability engineering team
Petoff develops and deploys consistent and reliable training and education programs for Google's site reliability engineers globally. She has been with Google for more than nine years. Prior to this role she worked as a senior training specialist for DoubleClick. Petoff has a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University.
Matt Stratton
DevOps advocate, PagerDuty
Stratton has more than 20 years of experience in IT operations. He lives, eats, and breathes DevOps (his car's license plate reads "DevOps"—no joke). He is also the founder and co-host of the Arrested DevOps podcast.
Open source
Kris Buytaert
Consulting CTO, Inuits.eu
Kris Buytaert is one of the instigators of the DevOps movement, who also brought attention to the sorry state of monitoring tools back in 2012. A longtime Linux and open-source consultant, he is a frequent speaker and organizer for international conferences. He puts a strong focus on infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, high availability, and scalability in the projects he takes on. His blog is titled "Everything Is a Freaking DNS Problem."
Damon Edwards
Co-founder and chief product officer, Rundeck
Edwards cares a lot about improving IT operations and how enterprises operate. He is a champion of IT operations—those teams which he believes serve as the unsung heroes of modern business. He is a frequent conference speaker, a co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast with John Willis, an early core organizer of the DevOpsDays series, and a content chair for the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Edwards will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Tracy Miranda
Director, open-source community CloudBees
Miranda is a vocal advocate for open-source practices. In addition to being a veteran of the Eclipse open-source community, She is an active blogger and speaker. She served for more than 10 years as a director at Kichwa Coders, and is an outspoken voice for increased diversity in the world of open source.
Jessica Rose
Technical manager, FutureLearn
A self-taught technologist, Rose founded Open Code study meetups as a peer-supported developer education opportunity. Rose is also the co-founder of Trans*Code and hosts the Pursuit Podcast about getting things done in tech.
Nithya Ruff
Leader, open source program office, Comcast
Ruff heads up the office that serves as the company's center of excellence for all things open source. Ruff has an extensive presence in the open-source community, including a seat on the Open Source Advisory Council and as a member of the steering committee for the Linux Foundation ToDo Group. She's also on the OpenChain Board. Ruff previously worked as the director of open-source strategy for SanDisk and as the director of product management and marketing for Synopsys.
Architecture
Silvia Botros
Principal engineer, Twilio
Botros is an expert in MySQL and has worked as a software engineer at CDNetworks as well as an authority about MySQL Small Business Server for SendGrid. Botros is a frequent conference speaker and has presented on topics ranging from "Become a MySQL Guru" to "Stories from the DBA Trenches." You can read her blog here.
Jennifer Davis
Senior cloud advocate, Microsoft
Davis knows a lot about design, planning, automation, tool development, and monitoring. Her passion is working with development, quality, release, and production operation engineers to build operable, maintainable, and reliable services. She focuses on education, information sharing, and continuous self-improvement, and is a speaker at many DevOps conferences as well as an organizer for her local DevOpsDays. She has also worked at Yahoo as the team lead for its Sherpa cloud storage service.
Jaana B. Dogan
Software engineer, Google Compute Engine
Dogan primarily works with the Go programming language, focusing on diagnostic tools and libraries. Prior to that, Dogan worked on various platform teams as well as API infrastructure at Google. Dogan has also worked on developer platforms and technical infrastructures in the past.
Scot Hanselman
Partner program manager, Microsoft
Hanselman has spent the last 12 years at Microsoft, both in his current role and as principal program manager. Prior to that, he was the chief architect for Corillian and spent time as an adjunct professor at the Oregon Institute of Technology. He also hosts three podcasts, including Hansel Minutes, as well as a YouTube channel.
Scott Havens
Director of software engineering, Walmart Labs and Jet.com
In his current roles, he serves as the chief architect for Walmart's omnichannel inventory for the largest company in the world (by revenue) across its e-commerce channels, hundreds of warehouses, and thousands of stores. He is also in charge of the team overseeing the development and ops for the Jet.com inventory management system.
Havens will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Courtney Kissler
VP, digital platform engineering, Nike
Kissler leads teams accountable for core commerce services (browse, search, checkout, payment, launch, inventory, fulfillment), user services (login, profile, identity, notifications), consumer data engineering, content ecosystem (authoring, creation, digital assets, workflow) member services, and global retail solutions. She is a strong believer in the technological transformations possible through DevOps, and is a regular speaker at DevOps conferences.
Kissler will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Andi Mann
Chief technology advocate, Splunk
After working as the vice president of products, strategy, and marketing at CA, Mann landed at Splunk. He focuses on helping teams analyze their operational intelligence data. He also works as a business technology strategist for Sageable. Follow him for insights on the intersection between DevOps and machine learning.
Scott Prugh
Chief architect and SVP, software engineering, CSG
Prugh works for CSG, which provides customer care and billing solutions for cable television providers. Prugh has been with CSG for over 20 years, holding various leadership positions, including CTO. Prugh has been a mainstay on the IT and technology conference circuit, including as a speaker at the first DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014.
Prugh will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Rosalind Radcliffe
Distinguished engineer and chief architect for DevOps, IBM
Radcliffe has worked at IBM for 30 years. In May 2019, she offered some insights on how the familiar technology of IBM can support organizations that explore DevOps and cloud computing, noting: "Many organizations already have the mainframe in their environment, but in many cases, are not taking advantage of all the capabilities." She is a regular speaker at the DevOps Enterprise Summit and other enterprise-oriented conferences.
Radcliffe will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
J. Paul Reed
Independent consultant, Release Engineering Approaches
As an experienced consultant in build engineering, release management, software configuration management, and process design, Reed focuses on discovering business requirements and integrating those needs so products ship faster and more reliably. He is also a licensed airplane pilot and says, "I draw on my experiences in aviation and my studies of other mission-critical disciplines to implement technical solutions which also address human factors, complex-systems theory, and organizational dynamics." He's worked in the trenches as a build/release engineer at VMware, Mozilla, and Symantec. In 2012, he founded his own consultancy, and he is a regular speaker at DevOps conferences each year.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Senior director of technology, Pivotal
Shafer is experienced with cloud migrations and is an expert in modern automation, architectures, and analytics. He focuses on increasing efficiencies through people, process, and technologies. Shafer has also held roles as a cloud builder at Rackspace and as the VP of engineering at Cloudscaling.
Randy Shoup
VP, engineering, WeWork
Shoup says, "I like a new challenge. So I suppose I have been more or less a serial expert, moving from databases and analytics platforms, to security software, to ecommerce and search, and more recently to cloud infrastructure." Shoup has more than 25 years in the software engineering space and has led engineering groups at eBay and Google. He's a frequent speaker on topics including scalability, cloud computing, data science, engineering culture, and DevOps. He's spent his career working on highly scalable, highly available, multi-tenant distributed systems serving hundreds of millions of users.
Jeffrey Snover
Chief architect, Azure Storage and Cloud Edge, Microsoft
According to Wikipedia, Snover is known primarily as the "father" and chief architect of Microsoft's command-line interpreter, Windows PowerShell, whose development began at the beginning of 2003. He also had the idea of an object pipeline and implemented the first prototype in the C# programming language. Snover has worked at Microsoft since 1999, including as the lead architect on Windows Server. He's a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences.
Ali Spittel
Distinguished faculty member, General Assembly
In addition to her main role, Spittel serves as a lead instructor for web development. She has also held positions as an instructor for both Python and Java Enterprise. Spittel is one of the hosts of the Ladybug Podcast, an all female-hosted tech podcast focused on development and technology.
Continuous integration/continuous delivery
Topo Pal
Senior director and senior distinguished engineer, Capital One
Pal has held leadership roles in technology at QuadraMed and Home Depot. An expert in DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery, natural language processing, and more, he is a frequent conference speaker and a repeat presenter at the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Heidi Waterhouse
Senior developer advocate, LaunchDarkly
Waterhouse helps evangelize feature flagging, DevOps, and continuous deployment. On LinkedIn, she calls herself a "writer who specializes in translating Geek to English. Lately, I've been interested in working with security and how people interact with it." With years of experience in various communication roles and as a technical writer, Waterhouse provides a unique view on the world of tech and has presented at over 40 conferences across three continents.
General DevOps
Helen Beal
"DevOpsologist," Ranger4
Beal is an outspoken proponent of DevOps practices in both her roles as a speaker and at consultancy Ranger4. She has been listed in TechBeacon's top 20 list of Influential Women in DevOps as well as PowerAdmin's "51 DevOps Influencers to Start Following Today." Beal has traveled the world speaking on a variety of DevOps topics and currently serves in multiple DevOps-centric roles, including as product owner at the DevOps Institute.
Aimee Bechtle
Director, infrastructure technology delivery, Capital One
Bechtle has over 20 years of experience in the world of technology and IT. She focuses on helping large organizations deliver value for their businesses more quickly and safely. She is also an expert in agile, lean, DevOps, and the cloud.
Kevin Behr
Chief scientific officer, PraxisFlow
Behr aims to simplify and deliver IT operations management guidance to market-leading corporations worldwide. He has also worked as the global CIO for HedgeServ and was the president and founder of the IT Process Institute.
Donnie Berkholz
VP, IT service delivery, CWT
Berkholz has over 15 years of experience promoting change for organizations ranging from startups to open-source communities to the Fortune 50. He has also worked as the program chair of the Open Source Summit and the director of development for 451 Research. He holds a PhD in computational structural biology from Oregon State University.
Ross Clanton
Executive director, technical modernization, Verizon
Clanton leads massive, multi-year modernization programs to improve the speed, quality, and cost structure across the company's entire platform. Clanton is a self-proclaimed "customer-centric" technology leader with deep expertise in key tech trends across the industry. Prior to Verizon, Clanton worked for nearly 20 years in various IT and leadership roles at Target.
Clanton will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Jessie Frazelle
Software engineer, Microsoft
Frazelle previously worked as an engineer at Google and Docker. She was a maintainer for Docker and has contributed code to Runc, Kubernetes, and the Go language. Now she works on Linux at a time when Microsoft is releasing its own custom kernels for the first time. She's an active blogger, so be sure to check out Ramblings from Jessie if you're working in Linux or using containers.
Ann Marie Fred
Senior software engineering manager, IBM Marketplace
Fred has been a software engineer for 20 years, with specialties in DevOps, cybersecurity, continuous delivery, cloud computing, web portal development, and IT systems management development. Her current organization is where development squads deploy dozens of changes per day to production, monitor their own components, and support them. She worked on the first DevOps-focused team at IBM in 2011.
Julia Grace
Senior director, product engineering, Slack
Grace first led the Slack developer platform team, after which she built the Slack infrastructure product and engineering team to over 100 people. Her work contributed to Slack's achieving significant gains in reliability and performance. She now leads the product engineering organization, where she maintains a high-velocity environment. She's a highly sought-after speaker who also advises early and mid-stage startup companies.
Nathen Harvey
Developer advocate, Google
Harvey has an extensive background in a variety of technical-based roles, including VP of community development at Chef Software and web operations manager at CustomInk. With experience across the entire gamut of web-based and enterprise applications—from technical support to deployment—Harvey is an expert in Ruby on Rails ops, production support, customer support, and training.
Erica Joy
Senior engineering manager, infrastructure, Patreon
Joy says she likes "to slay big problems and puzzles. My weapons of choice are logic, data, curiosity, and code." She is a member of the board of directors for Girl Develop It, a nonprofit that encourages women to pursue software engineering careers and provides resources for that pursuit. She's worked at Google in many roles, and she's spent time at Slack. With nearly 48,000 tweets under her belt, she is well worth following, and she clearly has a lot to say.
Chris Little
Senior director, research, Gartner
Describing himself as an "avid technologist," Little is a jack-of-all-trades. He has expertise in marketing, enterprise software sales, management, software as a service, DevOps, community engagement, and business development.
Erica Morrison
Executive director, CSG
At CSG, Morrison is in charge of software development and operations. Prior to her seven years with CSG, she worked as a software engineer for Union Pacific Railroad and for 10 years in various IT and technical roles with Lockheed Martin. Morrison has been invited to speak about various IT topics around the globe.
Morrison will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
Ernest Mueller
Head, engineering operations, Precisions Autonomy
An organizer of DevOpsDays Austin and CloudAustin, Mueller is an expert in DevOps and getting the most out of the software delivery pipeline. Mueller also has more than 20 years of experience in IT and tech roles and is an evangelist for not just DevOps, but also for cloud computing and agile methodologies.
Gareth Rushgrove
Director, product management, Snyk
Rushgrove, who has been in his current job since May of this year, was formerly a product manager with Docker. He's worked at Gov.uk, Puppet, and is probably best known for his DevOps Weekly newsletter, which has been running since 2010. His work on DevOps-enabling companies, along with curating his newsletter, keeps him in tune with all of the latest trends in the DevOps space.
George Spafford
Research director, IT Operations, Gartner
Spafford has held roles as the senior manager at Cognizant Technology Solutions and the VP of publishing for the IT Process Institute. He is a prolific author and speaker, and has consulted and conducted training around the globe on regulatory compliance, IT governance, and process improvement.
Mary Thengvall
Independent consultant, developer relationship strategies
Thengvall is a source for all things related to developer relationships. In addition to helping organizations build out a developer relations strategy, Thengvall was the founder of and is the chief curator for the DevRel Weekly newsletter. She's also the founding host of Community Pulse, a monthly podcast aimed at both developers and community managers. Thengvall has worked as a community manager at SparkPost and as the community builder for Chef.
Kelly Vaughn
Founder, The Taproom
Vaughn's agency is focused on providing Shopify Plus solutions for fast-growing businesses. Vaughn was also the co-founder and lead developer for Craft & Code and an ASPPH/APHIF fellow for the CDC. Vaughn is co-host of the popular Ladybug Podcast and is a Shopify Plus partner.
Derek Weeks
Vice president, Sonatype
Weeks is the co-founder of All Day DevOps, an online community of DevOps practitioners and thought leaders with over 60,000 members. In his role with Sonatype, Weeks helps lead efforts to evolve go-to-market strategies, strategic technology partnerships, community and developer advocacy, and industry research programs.
Sarah Wells
Technical director for operations and reliability, The Financial Times
Wells is not one to gush about her accomplishments or capabilities, but for a manager at the director level, her tweets tend to be much more technical than most, and that’s one good reason to put her on your to-follow list. She calls herself "an experienced tech leader, people manager, and principal engineer," whose key interests are "operability, observability, DevOps, microservices, influencing empowered teams, and maintaining service and quality in a continuous delivery world." As a frequent speaker at DevOps-related events, she draws on her expertise in Go, Java, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Neo4j, MongoDB, Git, Splunk, and RESTful APIs.
Michael Winslow
Director, software development and engineering, Comcast
Winslow has years of experience in cable, insurance, biotech, pharmaceuticals, food services, and more. A self-proclaimed DevOps enthusiast, he has a long track record as a conference speaker and presenter. Prior to Comcast, Winslow worked as a senior Java developer and Scrum master at Oracle.
Winslow will present at DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas.
You'll meet many of these experts at DevOps Enterprise Summit: Las Vegas 2019. The conference runs October 28-30, 2019.
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