If you're not following veterans and newcomers in the DevOps community, you're not seeing the whole picture and staying ahead of the curve. Almost three years ago, TechBeacon compiled a list of the top 100 DevOps leaders, practitioners, and experts to follow on social media. Since then, many new luminaries and new topics have emerged, and the article was in need of an update.
Here is a hand-picked list of 100 exceptional writers, speakers, and leaders who can teach you a great deal about DevOps. The list is organized into sub-topics: general DevOps, cloud, containers, serverless, monitoring, systems engineering, agile, and testing.
General DevOps
Nicole Forsgren
Founder, CEO, and chief scientist, DevOps Research and Assessments
@nicolefv
As an expert in using metrics to make software better, Forsgren says she likes to "rub science on things." She's been named a Top 10 Thought Leader in DevOps, a Top 100 Leader, and a Top 20 Most Influential Woman in DevOps. A self-styled IT-impacts expert, she sees her role as someone who can show leaders and tech professionals how to unlock the potential of technology change. She recently authored Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps with Jez Humble and Gene Kim.
Erica Joy
Senior engineering manager, infrastructure, Patreon
@EricaJoy
Joy 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. Before joining Patreon, Joy worked at Google in many roles, including as a site reliability engineer (SRE), and spent time working at Slack as well. Not that it's a competition, but Joy has more Twitter followers than most of the people on this list.
Jez Humble
Founder and CTO, DevOps Research and Assessment
@jezhumble
Humble is a co-author of the book Continuous Delivery, as well as Lean Enterprise and The DevOps Handbook. He's spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development, and consulting in companies of varying sizes across three continents. He's been a keynote speaker at the biggest agile and DevOps conferences around the world.
John Allspaw
Co-founder, Adaptive Capacity Labs
@allspaw
Allspaw is best-known for his work as the CTO of Etsy and as an engineering manager at Flickr. An expert on using heuristics for troubleshooting highly complex, scalable systems, 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.
Gareth Rushgrove
Product manager, Docker
@garethr
He's worked at Gov.uk, Puppet, and now Docker, but Rushgrove is probably best-known for his DevOps Weekly newsletter, which has been running since 2010. His work DevOps-enabling companies, along with curating his newsletter, keeps him in tune with all of the latest trends in the DevOps space.
Gene Kim
Author and researcher
@RealGeneKim
Kim's fame really took off with the publication of his book The Phoenix Project, a hypothetical account of a rescued IT initiative. Before that he had written The Visible Ops Handbook, and he has since written Beyond the Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook. He is now a highly sought-after speaker for DevOps conferences.
Martin Fowler
Chief scientist, ThoughtWorks
@martinfowler
Fowler, one of the Agile Manifesto signatories, continues to be very influential in the software industry. He's the author of numerous popular books, including Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Also popular is Fowler's "bliki," a cross between a blog and wiki, where emerging trends are distilled in a way that most IT professionals can understand them.
Patrick Debois
CEO, Zender
@patrickdebois
A name always helps people organize around a movement. When he coined the term "DevOps," Debois helped crystalize a massive sea change in IT that is still taking place today. He organized the first DevOpsDays conference, and recently he helped write The DevOps Handbook.
J. Paul Reed
Managing partner, Release Engineering Approaches
@jpaulreed
Reed has more than 15 years' experience in the trenches working as a build/release engineer at companies that include VMware, Mozilla, and Symantec. In 2012, he founded his own consultancy: Release Engineering Approaches. He's a regular speaker at DevOps conferences each year.
Kris Buytaert
Co-founder and CTO, Inuits
@KrisBuytaert
Buytaert was an early leader in the DevOps movement who also brought attention to the sorry state of monitoring tools back in 2012. He's a consistent conference speaker and organizer with a heavy focus on the open-source community.
John Willis
VP of DevOps and digital practices, SJ Technologies
@botchagalupe
Willis has worked for Docker, Socketplane (sold to Docker), Enstratius (sold to Dell), and Opscode (now Chef Software). In addition to being a popular speaker at DevOps conferences, Willis is also a prolific author who co-wrote The DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project.
Steve Smith
Consultant, Continuous Delivery Consulting
@SteveSmithCD
After working for Sky Network, Visa, and The Financial Times, Smith has been running a consultancy for several years around his area of expertise: continuous delivery. He is the author of Measuring Continuous Delivery and is a co-organizer of the Pipeline conference.
Matthew Skelton
Head of consulting, Conflux Digital
@matthewpskelton
A consultant for many years, Skelton continues to work with companies to improve their operations and achieve continuous delivery. He is the maintainer of the DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is the co-author of Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET and Team Guide to Software Operability. He was also a co-organizer of the first Pipeline conference.
Kief Morris
Head of cloud transformation practice, ThoughtWorks
@kief
Morris has been a ThoughtWorker for almost 10 years, and in that time he's written many insightful blog posts and a book titled Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud. Morris continues to help organizations achieve better software delivery by teaching infrastructure automation techniques and strategies.
Anna Shipman
Technical director, The Financial Times
@annashipman
Shipman spent several years working for the UK government's digital service, becoming its open-source strategy leader in her final years there. Now she works at The Financial Times, where her focus is on WebOps, leadership, development, and open source.
Alice Goldfuss
Engineer, GitHub
@alicegoldfuss
After building her engineering career as an IT contractor and an engineer at New Relic, Goldfuss now works as a "kernel crasher" at GitHub who's helping it run its cutting-edge container platform. She has consulted on some books (Docker: Up & Running, Effective DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering vol. 2), presented at several major conferences (SREcon, Velocity, Container Summit), and helped organize some as well (LISA17, DevOps Days Portland).
Anders Wallgren
CTO, Electric Cloud
@anders_wallgren
Wallgren is a veteran of Electric Cloud and a frequent conference speaker and writer. Prior to Electric Cloud, he played a critical leadership role in engineering award-winning software products, including Macromedia's Director 7 and several Shockwave products.
Dave Farley
Founder and director, Continuous Delivery Ltd
@davefarley77
Farley is a significant thought leader in the DevOps community who co-authored the award-winning book Continuous Delivery with Jez Humble. He continues to speak and write frequently.
Ann Marie Fred
Senior software engineering manager, IBM
@DukeAMO
Fred has worked at IBM as a software engineer since 1998 and has been a manager since 2015. She worked on the first DevOps-focused team at IBM in 2011, and currently works in the IBM Marketplace organization, where development squads deploy dozens of changes per day to production, monitor their own components, and support them.
Anjuan Simmons
Technical program manager, Questback
@anjuan
Simmons is a certified Scrum master and a popular speaker at a wide range of developer and DevOps conferences. He primarily writes in Swift and has also written a book: Minority Tech: Journaling Through Blackness and Technology.
Jayne Groll
Board member, DevOps Institute
@jaynegroll
Groll is a co-founder and board member of the DevOps Institute, where she focuses on establishing a global learning community that's based around emerging DevOps practices. She is also president of the ITSM Academy and is the author of the Agile Service Management Guide (PDF).
Mirco Hering
DevOps and agile practice lead, Accenture
@MircoHering
Hering is an active community member who blogs and speaks globally on agile, DevOps, and organizational psychology. He is the author of a new book called DevOps for the Modern Enterprise.
Gary Gruver
President, Gruver Consulting
@GRUVERGary
Gruver worked at Macy's and HP before starting his own consultancy. He's a frequent speaker who shares an interesting case study in his book, A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware.
Malcolm Jones
Web developer/DevOps engineer, Behance (acquired by Adobe)
@bossjones
A fashion enthusiast and former entrepreneur, Jones works on a small team of operations engineers at Behance, which is a popular designer social networking site that was acquired by Adobe. You'll find tweets about DevOps topics and Marvel movies on his feed.
Jennifer Davis
Senior systems engineer, Chef
@sigje
Davis 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.
Rosalind Radcliffe
Distinguished engineer, IBM
@RosalindRad
Radcliffe has worked at IBM for over 30 years. Currently she's an IBM distinguished engineer working with external clients on DevOps transformations and working internally on IBM's Z organization. She is a regular speaker at the DevOps Enterprise Summit and other enterprise-oriented conferences.
Marc Hornbeek
Principal DevOps consultant, Trace3
in/marchornbeek
Hornbeek is a consultant and course author for DevOps implementations. His 39 years’ experience includes leadership and technical roles at Trace3, Bell-Northern Research, Tekelec, ECI Telecom, GSI Lumonics, Vpacket. EdenTree Technologies, and Spirent Communications. Follow him on LinkedIn as well as Twitter.
Julia Grace
Senior director of infrastructure engineering, Slack
@jewelia
As director of infrastructure at Slack, Grace has maintained a high-velocity environment even as her team grew from 10 people to 60-plus. She's currently a highly sought-after speaker who also advises early and mid-stage startup companies.
Chris O'Dell
Senior consultant, Contino
@ChrisAnnODell
O'Dell works with companies on their enterprise cloud and DevOps transformations. She's the co-author of Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET and a contributor to Build Quality In. She's also a co-organizer of the Pipeline conference.
Juni Mukherjee
Owner, Continuity
@junitweets
Mukherjee has worked at a number of high-profile companies, including Atlassian, LifeLock, GoPro, Yahoo, and Apple. Now she runs her own company helping companies implement continuous delivery and domain-driven design. She's the author of The Power Of Continuous Delivery In DevOps and a speaker.
Mark Imbriaco
Global CTO for DevOps, Pivotal
@markimbriaco
Imbriaco has led operations and engineering at some big-name companies, including Heroku, Digital Ocean, GitHub, and 37Signals (now Basecamp). Now a global CTO for Pivotal, Imbriaco is a popular speaker who spends his days teaching Fortune 500 customers how to modernize the way they build software.
Alan Shimel
Founder and editor-in-chief, DevOps.com
@ashimmy
Not only is Shimel the CEO of DevOps.com, he's also the co-founder of the DevOps Institute and a managing partner at the CISO Group. Shimel writes and hosts podcasts on DevOps.com. He is active in the security and DevOps communities and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events.
Mark Schwartz
Enterprise strategist, AWS
@schwartz_cio
Before joining AWS, Schwartz was the CIO of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A frequent speaker at AWS and DevOps events, Schwartz is also a prolific blogger and author of two books: The Art of Business Value and A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility.
Inés Sombra
Director of engineering, Fastly
@randommood
Sombra is co-chair of the Velocity conference, one of the biggest DevOps conferences in the world. Before becoming director of engineering at Fastly, she was the lead data engineer at Engine Yard, a PaaS provider. She's a visionary in the fields of DevOps, distributed systems, and data science.
Alfonso Cabrera
Senior CloudOps engineer, Red Ventures
@alfonso__c
Cabrera is an active organizer for the DevOps community in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's the co-founder of Team Luna, a developer community in Charlotte, and the organizer of DevOpsDays Charlotte. He also organizes the Docker and Ansible meetups in Charlotte.
Damon Edwards
Co-founder and chief product officer, Rundeck
@damonedwards
Rundeck is a well-known open-source orchestration and scheduling platform born from a desire to automate runbooks, an old tool used by sysadmins. In addition to leading the direction of Rundeck's product, Edwards 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.
Paul Duvall
Co-founder and CTO, Stelligent
@PaulDuvall
Duvall is the author of Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, an early book on CI best practices. His company, Stelligent, focuses exclusively on helping customers build continuous delivery solutions on AWS.
Randy Shoup
VP of engineering, WeWork
@randyshoup
Shoup has over 25 years of experience 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.
Mike McGarr
Manager of developer productivity, Netflix
@SonOfGarr
McGarr is an experienced speaker and was previously Blackboard's director of DevOps. He's also the Washington, DC, continuous-delivery meetup organizer. He's been a Java and JVM-language developer for most of his career.
Brian Guthrie
Director of engineering, Meetup
@bguthrie
Guthrie ran engineering departments at SoundCloud and Slice. Now he works for the popular site Meetup.com, again as a director of engineering. Guthrie has great, ground-level insights on how to lead teams of engineers with agile and DevOps practices.
Michael Stahnke
Director of engineering, Puppet
@stahnma
Stahnke has been at Puppet Labs for over seven years. Previously he worked at Caterpillar and wrote the book Pro OpenSSH. His focus is making life easier for infrastructure engineers.
Bridget Kromhout
Principal cloud developer advocate, Microsoft
@bridgetkromhout
Kromhout is a prolific speaker and program committee member who focuses on Kubernetes, cloud computing, and a few other operations topics. She helps lead the DevOpsDays organization, podcasts with Arrested DevOps, and blogs at bridgetkromhout.com.
Shashikant Jagtap
Senior iOS analyst, YNAP
@Shashikant86
Previously an engineer at AOL and the BBC, Jagtap is a great person to follow on Twitter if you're interested in iOS-specific tools and techniques for DevOps, continuous delivery, and various types of testing. He's also an organizer for the test automation DevOps meetup in London.
Seth Vargo
Developer advocate — Google Cloud Platform, Google
@sethvargo
Vargo has worked at a number of operationally strong companies, including HashiCorp, Chef Software, and CustomInk. While working at Chef, he wrote the book Learning Chef. In addition to being a writer, he's also a prolific speaker on the DevOps circuit.
Aymen El Amri
Founder and CEO, Eralabs
@eon01
El Amri worked as a web developer, ops engineer, IT architect, and CTO before founding Eralabs. He's written two books (Painless Docker and Saltstack for DevOps), created JobsForDevOps.com, and founded the DevOps Links community, which is a great resource for DevOps content.
Jason Hand
DevOps evangelist, VictorOps
@jasonhand
Hand is the well-known face of VictorOps. In addition to being a frequent speaker and writer on the nuances of DevOps, Hand also hosts a podcast on building community in tech, called Community Pulse. He's also the author of two books: ChatOps: Managing Operations in Group Chat and Post-Incident Reviews: Learning from Failure for Improved Incident Response.
Greg Bledsoe
Managing consultant, Accenture
@geek_king
Bledsoe has a massive 65,000-plus followers on Twitter. As a major voice in the DevOps community, he frequently does webcasts and writes for several publications, including TechBeacon and Linux Journal. He's also a regular speaker at DevOpsCon.
Jason Cox
Director of systems engineering, Disney
@jasonacox
Cox succeeded in bringing DevOps practices to Disney's Internet group, along with benefits such as faster deploy times. A global user registration system that would previously take a full day to deploy was eventually able to deploy in one minute. Cox continues to support the Disney-branded businesses (studios, parks, interactive, consumer products, stores) and speaks at events, including the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Andi Mann
Chief technology advocate, Splunk
@AndiMann
After working as the vice president of products, strategy, and marketing at CA, Mann landed at Splunk, where he focuses on helping teams analyze their operational intelligence data. He also works as a business technology strategist for Sageable. He's a great person to follow for insights on the intersection of DevOps and machine learning.
Ryn Daniels
Staff infrastructure engineer, Travis CI
@rynchantress
Daniels is a seasoned conference speaker who has covered topics across the operations spectrum. After helping shape the engineering organization at Etsy for several years, Daniels now supports continuous integration tooling at Travis CI. Daniels is the co-author of Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale.
Courtney Kissler
VP of digital platform engineering, Nike
@chawklady
Kissler has worked as a sysadmin, network engineer, infrastructure engineer, and vice president of technology. She has worked at Nordstrom, Starbucks, and now Nike. Kissler is a regular speaker at DevOps conferences and has been a leader in IT cultural transformations for more than 15 years.
Tapabrata Pal
Senior director and senior engineering fellow, Capital One
@TopoPal
Pal has been leading Capital One through its DevOps transformation for over five years. He is also the community manager and product owner of the open-source project Hygieia.
John Arundel
Owner, Bitfield Consulting
@bitfield
With a massive 101,000 Twitter followers, Arundel is an ops expert you can't afford to ignore. He has decades of experience managing Unix systems and consulting for high-profile companies. He's the author of the Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide and consults on technologies including Puppet, Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud, Terraform, and Go.
Containers
Kelsey Hightower
Staff developer advocate, Google Cloud Platform, Google
@kelseyhightower
Hightower is an expert on containers, Google's Go programming language, and Kubernetes. An advocate for open source, he works at Google and frequently shares his knowledge in workshops and conferences. He's most notably an all-star on the operations and Go language (golang) speaking circuits.
Solomon Hykes
Board member, Docker
@solomonstre
Who better to follow in the container community than Hykes, the founder of Docker? Though he has stepped down from the company and joined the board of directors, the self-professed entrepreneur and hacker regularly engages in discourse with fellow thought leaders.
Vincent Batts
Principal software engineer, Office of the CTO, Red Hat
@vbatts
Red Hat principal software engineer Batts focuses on Linux, Linux containers, and polyglot programming. An open-source enthusiast, Batts is an open container proponent. Tech tweets aside, Batts often shares meditative thoughts and humorous quips.
Joseph Jacks
Founder, KubeCon
@asynchio
Jacks founded KubeCon and was one of the founders of Kismatic, a Kubernetes company that was acquired by Apprenda. He's also very active in the Cloud Native Foundation and tweets about all things Kubernetes. Check out Jacks’ Twitter feed for thoughts on startups and open-source tech.
Jessie Frazelle
Software engineer, Microsoft
@jessfraz
Frazelle worked as an engineer at Google and Docker before landing at Microsoft. She was a maintainer for Docker and has contributed code to Runc, Kubernetes, and the Go language. At Microsoft, she works on Linux at a time when the company is releasing its own custom kernels for the first time. Make sure you read her blog if you're working in Linux or using containers.
Kris Nova
Senior developer advocate, Heptio
@krisnova
Previously a software engineer at Deis and Microsoft, with roots in Linux and C, Nova is now a developer advocate for the Kubernetes startup Heptio. She has a deep technical background in the Go programming language, which she has used to contribute to Kubernetes and kops and to create the kubicorn project. She's a seasoned speaker, and the co-author of Cloud Native Infrastructure.
Justin Garrison
Senior systems engineer, Walt Disney Animation Studios
@rothgar
Garrison is the co-author of Cloud Native Infrastructure. He works on distributed systems, containers, Kubernetes, and monitoring at Walt Disney Animation Studios, and also does consulting.
Vladimir Vivien
Software engineer, VMware
@VladimirVivien
Vivien gained recognition early in his career as a member of the Java and Spring communities. Now his focus is on golang, machine learning, and Kubernetes. He also wrote a book on Go. He's worked at Citi, VMware, SpringSource, Pivotal, and Dell.
Laura Frank
Director of engineering, Codeship (now CloudBees)
@rhein_wein
Laura Frank is an expert in deployment methods. She's the director of engineering for the Codeship product, which was recently acquired by CloudBees. Before that, she worked at CenturyLink and HP. She's a frequent speaker at container and DevOps events.
Chen Goldberg
Engineering director, Google
@GoldbergChen
After working on infrastructure automation in the Israeli Defense Force and then on cloud computing at HPE, she now works on Kubernetes and other open-source projects at Google. She has spoken at major DevOps events for several years.
Bryan Liles
Staff engineer, Heptio
@bryanl
After being a cloud engineer at several companies, including Capital One and Digital Ocean, Liles landed at the startup Heptio, where he works on ways to make Kubernetes configuration easier. Presenting on topics ranging from machine learning to containers to building the next generation of developers, Liles is a consistent speaker at major conferences, such as KubeCon and Velocity.
Michelle Noorali
Senior software engineer, Microsoft
@michellenoorali
Noorali is a member of the Kubernetes steering committee and holds the developer seat on the governing board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Before joining Microsoft to work on the Azure containers team, she worked at Engine Yard, a Ruby on Rails PaaS. She's a frequent conference speaker that often talks about Helm and Kubernetes.
Aparna Sinha
Product management lead, Google
@apbhatnagar
Sinha leads the Kubernetes and Container Engine team at Google. Initially, she worked on the Android platform at Google. Before Google she worked at NetApp and McKinsey & Co.
Monitoring, reliability, and observability
Charity Majors
Founder, CEO, and engineer, Honeycomb
@mipsytipsy
As one of the best-known operations engineers and founders in Silicon Valley, Majors has some of the best Twitter threads for SREs, DevOps engineers, developers, and various operations professionals to learn from. After building her renown at Parse and Facebook, she co-founded Honeycomb, a monitoring/observability service. Not only should you follow Majors on Twitter, but you should also read her engrossing articles at charity.wtf and honeycomb.io/blog.
Julia Evans
Software engineer, Stripe
@b0rk
While her title may be "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 topics that are considered difficult by newcomers.
Baron Schwartz
Founder and CEO, VividCortex
@xaprb
His path started with an interest in time series databases and their potential to improve software monitoring, which led to the creation of VividCortex, Schwartz's tool for deep database monitoring. As a developer of monitoring and observability software, Schwartz knows a thing or two about best practices for reliability engineering.
Liz Fong-Jones
Staff SRE, Google
@lizthegrey
Fong-Jones has been an SRE at Google for 10 years. Now, as a speaker and customer reliability engineer for Google Cloud Platform, she's sharing her decade's worth of experience with large customers and the wider SRE community.
Sarah Wells
Technical director for operations and reliability, The Financial Times
@sarahjwells
Wells spoke at seven events last year, including DevOpsDays London, two QCons, and Velocity. Her tweets can be more technical than most managers at the director level. She has expertise in Go, Java, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Neo4j, MongoDB, Git, Splunk, and RESTful APIs.
Architecture and systems engineering
Susan Fowler
Editor-in-chief of Increment magazine, Stripe
@susanthesquark
Fowler is currently working at Stripe as the editor-in-chief of Increment, an online operations and software engineering magazine. She's the author of Production-Ready Microservices and was one of Time magazine's people of the year in 2017. She has over 42,000 followers on Twitter and is one of the key voices in Silicon Valley.
Cindy Sridharan
Engineer, Apple
@copyconstruct
Sridharan is one of the best writers and speakers to emerge in the operations engineering community over the last few years. Her popular blog posts—Monitoring and Observability, Testing Microservices, the sane way, and Testing in Production, the safe way—were widely praised by the operations community. Now the ideas from many of those posts are going into her new book, Scaling Microservices: Platform Engineering for Distributed Systems.
Tyler Treat
Managing partner, Real Kinetic
@tyler_treat
Treat worked at Workiva and Apcera before landing at Real Kinetic. His specialties are distributed systems, messaging infrastructure, and resilience engineering, which he blogs about on bravenewgeek.com.
Daniel Bryant
Product architect, Datawire.io
@danielbryantuk
In addition to his position at Datawire, Bryant runs his own consulting firm, Big Picture Tech. He's a leader in the London Java community and the author of Continuous Delivery in Java. His main topics of interest include cloud, containers, and microservices.
Caitie McCaffrey
Azure Sphere services architect and lead, Microsoft
@caitie
McCaffrey is an expert in building large-scale distributed systems and services. She worked on video games, including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, Halo 4, and Halo 5, before joining the observability team at Twitter and then moving to Microsoft to work on Azure Sphere. McCaffrey is a sought-after conference speaker who has done many sessions and some keynotes over the past several years.
Serverless
Peter Sbarski
VP of engineering and content, A Cloud Guru
@sbarski
Sbarski is one of the leaders in the serverless community and a prolific writer on the topic. He is a founder of the ServerlessConf and the author of Serverless Architectures on AWS. In addition to building the cloud training company, A Cloud Guru, Sbarski is also the CTO of Ephemeral.
Marcia Villalba
Senior backend developer, Rovio
@mavi888uy
Villalba's FooBar YouTube channel is a treasure trove of screencast lessons on AWS serverless and other AWS topics. She's the go-to resource for learning the finer points of AWS Lambda and other AWS services, and she's a frequent speaker on these topics as well. She's also the tech lead for Girls in Tech in Helsinki, Finland.
Erica Windisch
Founder and CTO, IOpipe
@ewindisch
During her long history in cloud computing, Windisch has been ahead of the curve and was a maintainer for both OpenStack and Docker in their early days. Having previously worked at Docker and CloudScaling, she now focuses on building tools for developers to instrument and monitor serverless applications. She's a regular speaker at serverless and DevOps conferences.
Mike Roberts
Partner, Symphonia
@mikebroberts
Roberts is an engineering leader and co-founder of the serverless and cloud consultancy Symphonia. He's known for writing the introduction to serverless architectures on the Martin Fowler bliki and for being a regular speaker at conferences.
Timirah James
Developer advocate, Platform9 Systems
@timirahj
Along with being a developer advocate, Timirah James is the founder of TechniGal LA, a meetup group dedicated to inspiring women to pursue careers in STEM. In addition to being a frequent speaker, James is also a leader in the Los Angeles and Silicon Beach tech communities and an active participant in the hackathon circuit. Her company, Platform9, builds a FaaS service on top of Kubernetes.
Agile, DevOps, and testing
Katrina Clokie
Test practice manager, BNZ
@katrina_tester
Clokie is an active contributor to the international testing community. She's 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.
Dan North
Principal, Dan North & Associates
@tastapod
North is the person who came up with behavior-driven development (BDD), a popular testing methodology. With over 25 years of experience in IT, Dan is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide. He's also a frequent and popular blogger.
Johnathan Smart
Head of Ways of Working, Barclays
@jonsmart
Smart is tasked with enabling continuous improvement, agile, continuous delivery, and DevOps at Barclays Group. He's the perfect person to follow if you're interested in applying agile practices to the financial IT industry, since he's worked for banks for over 20 years.
Lisa Crispin
Tester, Pivotal Labs
@lisacrispin
Crispin's title is simple and humble, but it doesn't really do her justice. Her contributions and renown in the testing community reach far and wide. She's the author of Testing Extreme Programming, Agile Testing, and More Agile Testing. Crispin is a highly sought-after speaker at DevOps, testing, and agile conferences.
Elisabeth Hendrickson
VP of R&D and data, Pivotal
@testobsessed
Hendrickson has worked as a tester, developer, writer, and agile enabler at Sybase, Aveo, and now Pivotal. She's a frequent speaker at agile, testing, and DevOps conferences, currently focused on topics including Extreme Programming, exploratory testing, and continuous delivery.
Sam Guckenheimer
Product owner, Visual Studio Team Services, Microsoft
@SamGuckenheimer
Guckenheimer is a 15-year veteran of Microsoft who has helped Microsoft's Visual Studio platform keep pace with the changes in agile methodologies and the emergence of DevOps. He's been a frequent speaker at agile and DevOps conferences for many years.
Dominica DeGrandis
Director of digital transformation, Tasktop
@dominicad
DeGrandis is the author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work and Flow. She worked at companies including AT&T and LeanKit before arriving at Tasktop. As a speaker and consultant, her work focuses on teaching organizations lean, Kanban, and Flow methods to improve workflow and throughput.
Kaimar Karu
President, itSMF Estonia
@kaimarkaru
Karu has a diverse background in IT. He has worked in operations, software development, project and program management, and service management. He has a passion for helping people learn and improve and has worked as a teacher, trainer, and coach in schools, universities, and professional training organizations across Europe.
Donovan Brown
Senior DevOps program manager, Microsoft
@DonovanBrown
"Why is DevOps one of the hottest topics? Because it hurts the most." That's what Brown will tell you at one of his numerous teaching or speaking engagements. He helps companies across the globe learn DevOps and agile through the Visual Studio Team Foundation ecosystem. Before joining Microsoft in 2013, Brown spent seven years as a process consultant and a certified Scrum master.
Cloud
Adrian Cockcroft
VP, cloud architecture strategy, AWS
@adrianco
As a frequent conference speaker, Cockcroft remains at the forefront of new technology. He has extensive knowledge of the cloud space, evidenced by his current place at AWS and former role as a cloud architect at Netflix. He was also a distinguished engineer at eBay and Sun Microsystems.
Jessica Deen
Cloud DevOps advocate, Microsoft
@jldeen
Deen worked in IT consulting and system administration for more than 10 years before moving to Microsoft. She is a frequent speaker at operations conferences and holds many IT certifications.
Brian Gracely
Director of product strategy — OpenShift, Red Hat
@bgracely
Gracely previously worked at Wikibon, EMC, NetApp, and Cisco, but perhaps he's best known for being the longtime host of The Cloudcast. At Red Hat he focuses on OpenShift product strategy, and he also hosts another podcast called PodCTL; it's about Kubernetes.
Ashley McNamara
Software engineer, Microsoft
@ashleymcnamara
McNamara is a contributor in the Linux and Go communities as a software engineer and developer advocate. She worked for Rackspace and Pivotal before landing on Microsoft's Azure team. 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.
Sam Newman
Independent consultant, Sam Newman & Associates
@samnewman
Newman worked at ThoughtWorks and Google before settling in at his own consulting firm. He's the author of Building Microservices and a frequent speaker and workshop leader. His topic specialties are cloud, continuous delivery, microservices, and serverless.
Joseph Sandoval
Cloud platform manager, Adobe
@jrsfifo
Sandoval has gone from sysadmin to cloud platform manager as he's worked at companies such as Lithium, Bare Minerals, and now Adobe. Not only does he specialize in cloud engineering and strategy, but he also drives DevOps practices.
Abby Fuller
Senior technical evangelist, AWS
@abbyfuller
Prior to joining Amazon, Fuller worked for a number of startups, including Airtime and Hailo. Now she works on containers and other ops projects. She has spoken at a number of events, including Velocity and DockerCon. You can ask her questions on Twitter with the hashtag #askawsabby
Santosh Hari
Director of software development, Konacom
@_s_hari
Hari is a Microsoft Azure MVP and a frequent speaker about cloud computing and serverless in that ecosystem. At Konacom he works on bringing affordable wireless broadband to the developing world. He also runs a software consulting company, Sand Dollar Technology, with his wife. Hari is the president and co-organizer of Orlando Codecamp, and he also volunteers at the Orlando .NET User Group.
David Linthicum
Chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting
@DavidLinthicum
Linthicum has been a cloud computing consultant for many years, first as a senior vice president for Cloud Technology Partners, and now as the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte. He has also been a prolific writer for InfoWorld and TechBeacon. Take a look at the steady stream of talks and articles he shares on Twitter, and be sure to check out some of his 50-plus TechBeacon articles.
Jeffrey Snover
Technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage & Cloud Edge, Microsoft
@jsnover
Snover is the inventor of PowerShell and has worked at Microsoft since 1999. He worked as the lead architect on Windows Server and now is the chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge. He's a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences.
Are there any other Twitter handles you would add to this list? Share them below.
Special thanks to Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim for their suggestions.
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