Aaron is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS based in Frisco, TX. With over 15 years of experience spanning system administration, networking, and training, he brings more than a decade of cloud expertise to help Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts master AWS technologies. His philosophy is simple: always be learning something new, and have fun while doing it! Aaron shares his knowledge through workshops, online courses, mentoring, and live streaming – making complex cloud concepts accessible and enjoyable. When he's not building in the cloud, you'll find him exploring craft beer scenes in new cities or teaming up with friends in Marvel Rivals on his PlayStation, because even superheroes need good teammates!

Alex Williams is the founder of The New Stack, a news site that explains and analyzes what's pertinent to engineers as they develop scaled-out infrastructure for today's complex applications.. After a 12-year run, Alex has retired. He loves the DevOps world and plans to spend the years ahead traveling, writing, cooking, and playing golf as much as possible. He loves speaking and moderating, so he is always game when the opportunity arises

Ankit Agarwal is a Senior Software Engineer at TikTok, Inc. in Seattle, Washington, with over ten years of specialized experience across four of the most technically demanding organizations in the global technology industry. Ankit began their career at SAP SE, contributing to backend itinerary services infrastructure within the enterprise travel division of a company serving over 400,000 customers across 180 countries. Ankit then joined Amazon, where they engineered real-time fraud detection systems on the buyer fraud prevention team - work that directly protected the financial integrity of one of the world's highest-volume transactional platforms, serving hundreds of millions of customers. At Microsoft, Ankit served as a software engineer on the Azure Container Registry team, contributing to the cloud-native artifact infrastructure that underpins deployment pipelines for enterprises globally. Ankit currently holds a critical role on TikTok's Decisions Platform team, responsible for the real-time decision infrastructure serving over one billion users. Key contributions include leading the live migration of a production decision engine with zero behavioral change, designing a shadow and equivalence testing framework to validate correctness under live traffic, building configuration-drift detection systems, and pioneering the integration of AI tooling into production DevOps workflows. This decade-long trajectory across SAP, Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok reflects a sustained record of original, high-impact engineering contribution at a level characteristic of a professional at the top of their field.

Anna Daugherty is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Arnica where she spends her days trying figure out application security in an increasingly agentic world. She has been a product marketer for more than 6 years, and in technology marketing for 11+ years. She enjoys video games, tabletop roleplaying, horror movies, and Carly Rae Jepsen.

The award losing security jester returns.

Bea has keynoted DevOpsDays Portland, and given talks at SecTor, PuppetConf, LasCon, Operability.io, Velocity various Bsides and DevOpsDays.

From a career spanning longer than she'd like to think about, but she's used a Linux 1.x kernel, and remembers when ipfwadm was the in thing.

Ben is a software engineer and community leader with extensive knowledge and expertise in the Puppet ecosystem. He's honored to call many of you friend and learn from you every day. He's been organizing Linux Users Groups, run clubs, and roller derby teams for most of his adult life and even a bit before that. Before coming to Puppet, he taught Anthropology grad students how to code in Java and then used that experience to introduce Puppet to many of you.

Ben has been obsessed with collective benefit for decades and is motivated by enabling the success of others. He's been dreaming of a world in which his skills don't just feed the capitalist maw. He is a long-distance runner but isn't interested in boasting about race times; he'd rather hear how your race went for

I currently work for ISRG as an SRE on the Let's Encrypt project.

In the past I have worked for Tripwire, Oracle, Yahoo! and BlueBox, usually doing something between system administration and writing code.

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling firewalls and crushing stacks. I have been known to remodel panic() functions on coffee breaks, making them more efficient in the area of crash recovery. I translate computer jargon for Microsoft refugees, I write eyebrow raising parodies*, I manage time with chrony. Occasionally, I work feverishly for 3 days in a row. I woo Linux with my sensational and hypnotic keyboard typing, I can pilot fsck around bad sectors with ease, and I can induce qubits to spin faster. I am an expert in System Administration, a veteran in UNIX, and an outlaw at CERT.

By day I am a people manager at Red Hat, in charge of the Community Linux Engineering group. We make the platform for Fedora, CentOS, and EPEL & drive it forward.

* Thank you, Hugh Gallagher

Fisherman by birth. Civil Engineer by training. Charlie Sharpsteen is a Principal Solutions Engineer at Overlook InfraTech where he spends his time pulling infrastructure and configuration management tools apart to understand why the pieces work they way they do.

Daniel is a product designer and Oregon native. By day he works at Flox on developer tooling for environment and package management. By night he spends his time training for and running ultramarathons. He's tried using AI to code and run at the same time, with mixed results.

Eric is renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author, baseball expert, open source maintainer and CNCF Ambassador. As Technology Advocate Lead at SUSE, he chooses roles that allow him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native, development, and observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies and organizations. More on https://www.schabell.org.

Erika is a DevOps engineer specialized in video and streaming media infrastructure. Based in Montevideo, Uruguay, she works at the intersection of traditional DevOps practices and the unique operational demands of live and on-demand video platforms. She holds the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification and has hands-on experience building cloud-native infrastructure for streaming workflows using Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, FFmpeg, and TSDuck. She has also worked in other big industries as Airlines and Gaming.

Guinevere Saenger started out her professional life as a classical pianist, and after a few adventures transitioned to a second career in tech. She found her happy place in the world of SRE/platform engineering and developer tooling, and today, she works on open source cloud provider plugins for Pulumi.
Guinevere has been active in the Kubernetes community, where she has created documentation and workshops for new contributors, and served as Release Lead for the 1.17 Kubernetes release.
She is @guincodes on Bluesky, @guineveresaenger on GitHub, and can be found on the Kubernetes and Pulumi community slacks as well.
A resident of Seattle, Guinevere enjoys music, food, and the outdoors.

Jeremy one of those curious folks with both a technical and a strategic streak. Passionate about people and entrepreneurship, integration and automation. Through technical/business roles at Neo4j, Dagger, GitHub, Twistlock, and Puppet, Jeremy has both zoomed in and zoomed out a lot, acquiring an appreciation for the details and an ever-broader sense of the big architectural picture.

Jim Perrin is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, with over 20 years of experience building multiple Linux distros. Jim is a former CentOS Board member, working extensively at the intersection of enterprise Linux, cloud, and upstream community.

Infrastructure Lead @ AlmaLinux

Josh Berkus, who works in Red Hat's Open Source Practice Office, has 20 years of Postgres experience and 11 years of Kubernetes experience, and just as much experience running open source projects. He is local to Portland and runs the Cloud Native PDX meetup.

Justin serves as Field CTO at Sidero Labs and hosts the Fork Around and Find Out podcast. He has been called the Steven Spielberg of Cloud Native and the Bill Nye of tech. His career includes contributions to Oscar-winning films, the Disney+ streaming platform, and Amazon EKS. In his free time, Justin enjoys building modern-retro computers and watching Moana.

Kat spent years leading technical support teams on the front lines of incident response before moving to the stage to talk about it. As Senior Manager of Developer Relations at PagerDuty, she leverages 12+ years of experience to help teams communicate clearly when everything is on fire. She speaks at conferences globally on sustainable incident management practices, cross-functional collaboration, and career development. When she's not wrangling incidents, she's wrangling two rabbits (Lupin and Ginny), a dog named Violet, and an ambitious collection of houseplants.

Kevin Hartman leads the Partner Solutions Architects team at Databricks, who help consulting partners build Data and AI solutions on the Databricks platform.

Kevin has been solving complex problems using technology and data for over 3 decades. His specialty is formulating high-impact solutions that leverage emerging technology innovations. He has inspired, influenced, and led the creation of hundreds of digital products — working from both inside and alongside teams of researchers, scientists, designers, engineers, and enthusiasts.

Kevin has a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and a masters degree in Information and Data Science from UC Berkeley, and invited as faculty member to the later program. He is based in Chicago.

Solutions focused data nerd currently working on Product Analytics Engineering at IBM Hashicorp.

Maarika Teose is a technology leader with over a decade of experience driving innovation across diverse industries. She is currently the Head of DevSecOps for a global automotive OEM, where she focuses on delivering secure, scalable software development platforms for next-generation Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Previously, she led DevOps for Powell’s Books, and was a Release Manager at Jama Software. She is passionate about leadership and developing high performing teams. She is a proud mom of two kiddos and loves to dance.

Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator working at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's gone from CTO to IC across operations, AI, cloud, and platform engineering, with time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. His training has reached over a million engineers, and he now leads AI-for-organizations work as a Principal Training Architect at Accenture LearnVantage. His current focus is agentic AI security: how the CNCF platform stack most teams already run — GitOps, admission control, runtime detection, observability — covers roughly 80% of what governs AI agents in production, and what the remaining 20% actually takes, namely agent identity, LLM input/output sanitization, and MCP tool-call governance. He speaks at KubeCon, CNCF events, and most recently AI Engineer World's Fair on Claude Code, MCP, and agent governance for platform engineers. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.

Pramod Sadalage is Distinguished Engineer at ThoughtWorks leading the Modern Data Architecture service for North America, he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He is usually sent in to clients with particularly challenging data needs, which require new technologies and techniques. In the early 00’s he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations.

He is co-author Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, co-author of NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence and continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.

Shalini Sudarsan is a DevSecOps Engineering Leader at KinderCare Learning Companies, Portland, OR, USA. Designing reliable, secure, and cost-optimized data and AI platforms. A Forbes Technology Council Member, Fellow of IETE and Women in Engineering (WIE) Oregon section, she drives enterprise AI adoption with a governed operating model that speeds time-to-market while lowering risk and spend. Shalini’s expertise spans BI strategy, data platform architecture, MLOps, observability, and value realization. She is known for translating complex engineering into measurable business outcomes. Shalini brings deep technical rigor and business expertise in the areas of DevOps and Reliability Engineering.A committed advocate for advancing technology, Shalini regularly presents at international conferences and contributes to IEEE and ACM as a technical reviewer.

Sri Ramkrishna has had a colorful and varied career. He started in Enterprise IT, spending 15 years crawling under servers in datacenters, writing tools, and managing enterprise-class storage before moving into professional open source. Since then, Sri has worn many hats — developer advocate, community builder, event organizer — alongside technical roles like firmware QA and building open-hardware servers on open toolchains.

To say Sri loves working with Linux is an understatement. He currently serves as a Director of the GNOME Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the finances and assets of the GNOME Project. Today, Sri runs a consulting business focused on his core strengths: open source strategy, community development, and technical infrastructure.

Previously at Intel, ITRenew

Whitney Lee is a creator and systems thinker who explores how observability, AI, and platform engineering connect across the cloud native ecosystem. She brings humor, depth, and clarity to complex technologies while building original frameworks that help others understand how systems fit together. She runs a vibrant YouTube channel, hosts Datadog Illuminated and Software Defined Interviews, has delivered two KubeCon keynotes and countless breakout talks, and combines storytelling and technical rigor to illuminate the human side of cloud native engineering.