Abby Kearns

Cloud Foundry Foundation

With nearly twenty years in the tech world, Abby Kearns is a true veteran of the industry. Her lengthy career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. As Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby helms the ecosystem of developers, users and applications running on Cloud Foundry, and works closely with the Board to drive the Foundation’s vision and grow the open source project. Prior to Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby focused on Pivotal Cloud Foundry as part of the Product Management team at Pivotal. She spent eight years at Verizon where she led Product Management and Product Marketing teams dedicated to the early days of cloud services. In her free time, Abby enjoys indulging in food and wine, and spending time with her husband and son.

Alexis Richardson

Weaveworks

Alexis is the co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks. He is also the chairman of the TOC for CNCF, and the co-founder of the Coed:Code meet ups. Previously he was at Pivotal, as head of products for Spring, RabbitMQ, Redis, Apache Tomcat and vFabric. Alexis was responsible for resetting the product direction of Spring and transitioning the vFabric business from VMware. Alexis co-founded RabbitMQ, and was CEO of the Rabbit company acquired by VMware in 2010, where he worked on numerous cloud platforms. Rumours persist that he co-founded several other software companies including Cohesive Networks, after a career as a prop trader in fixed income derivatives, and a misspent youth studying and teaching mathematical logic.

Aparna Sinha

Google

Aparna Sinha leads the product team at Google for Kubernetes and Container Engine. She started and co-leads the community PM Special Interest Group (SIG) to maintain an open backlog for the Kubernetes project on Github. Aparna is currently a secondary member of the CNCF Governing Board. She has worked in enterprise software for 15+ years, and was formerly a Director of Product at NetApp. Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and has co-authored several technical papers during her research.

Brandon Philips

Red Hat

Brandon Philips, as co-founder and CTO of CoreOS at Red Hat, is building modern server infrastructure. He leads teams building enterprise products, like CoreOS Tectonic, the enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform, and pioneering cloud native open source projects like Container Linux. Prior to CoreOS, he worked at Rackspace hacking on cloud monitoring and was a Linux kernel developer at SUSE.

Craig Box

Google

Craig Box leads the Cloud Native advocacy team at Google Cloud. He has worked with customers and communities since the launch of Kubernetes in 2014, and last year delivered talks on 5 continents. He is the co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. Craig started his career in systems administration, and has over 15 years of experience in development, deployment, DevOps, consulting, advisory and management roles around the world.

Dan Kohn

Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Dan is Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus. He also helped create and launch the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative as an industry-wide response to the security vulnerabilities demonstrated by Heartbleed. He previously served as CTO of several startups, including Spreemo, a healthcare marketplace, and Shopbeam, a shoppable ads company. Earlier, he was a general partner at Skymoon Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm that created startups in semiconductors and telecom infrastructure. Dan helped manage a number of telecoms firms controlled by Craig McCaw and started his career as founder and CEO of NetMarket, one of the first Internet companies. In 1994, he led the development of the first music store on the web, conducting the first secure commercial transaction after building the first web shopping cart. Dan lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

David Aronchick

Google

David Aronchick was the Senior Product Manager for the Google Container Engine and led product management on behalf of Google for Kubernetes. David has been helping to ship software for nearly 20 years, founding and being part of the management team for three different startups, as well as squeezing in time at Microsoft, Amazon, Chef, and now Google. David is co-founder of the Kubeflow project, an effort to help developers and enterprises deploy and use ML cloud-natively everywhere.

Dirk Hohndel

VP & Chief Open Source Officer, VMware

Dirk is VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, leading the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank. Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. He currently is a member of the Board of the Linux Foundation. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Lew Tucker

Cisco

As VP/CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, Lew is responsible for shaping Cisco’s strategy and products in cloud computing and leads several of the company’s open source initiatives. He also serves as a member of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors. Lew brings to the CNCF more than 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, ranging from distributed systems and artificial intelligence to software development and parallel system architecture. Prior to joining Cisco, Lew was VP/CTO Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems where he led the development of the Sun Cloud platform. While at Sun, Lew was also a member of the JavaSoft executive team, launched java.sun.com, and helped to bring Java into the developer ecosystem. Intrigued by the software-as-a-service model for application delivery, Lew joined Salesforce.com and led the development of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. In the 1980’s Lew was a research director at Thinking Machines, where he developed algorithms for AI and machine vision for the massively parallel Connection Machine. Lew moved into technology following a career in Neurobiology at Cornell University Medical school and has a BA in Biology from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from New York University.

Liz Rice

Aqua Security

Liz Rice is the Technology Evangelist with container security specialists Aqua Security, and also works on container-related open source projects including manifesto and kube-bench. She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London.

Oliver Beattie

Monzo

Oliver Beattie is Head of Engineering at Monzo, leading the development of the distributed systems to power a new kind of bank. He previously worked on Hailo's global micro-services platform.

Ralph Squillace

Microsoft

Ralph Squillace is a Principal Program Manager for the open-source, container-native dev and ops Kubernetes tooling built by Azure. He oversees contributions to Helm, Draft, Brigade, VS Code Kubernetes extensions, and any random thing that makes building apps in containers easier, faster, and more secure.

Sahil Dua

Booking.com

Sahil is a software developer at Booking.com. He has been involved in leveraging container infrastructure to help Booking.com’s internal teams in taking advantage of deep learning techniques at scale. An open source software enthusiast, Sahil is a core contributor and community leader for DuckDuckGo's open source organization. Besides that he is one of the contributors to the Git project, pandas - open source data analysis library, Linguist project by GitHub and Go-GitHub project by Google.

Sarah Wells

Financial Times

Sarah Wells has been a developer for 15 years, leading delivery teams across consultancy, financial services and media. Over the last few years she has developed a deep interest in operability, observability and devops, and this has recently led to her taking over responsibility for Operations and Reliability at the Financial Times. Before that, she lead work at the FT on building a semantic publishing platform, making it easy to discover and access all the FT’s published content via APIs in a common and flexible format. That project meant a focus on Go, microservices, containerisation, and how to influence teams to do the right things.

Simon Wardley

Leading Edge Forum

Simon Wardley is a Researcher for Leading Edge Forum, a global research and thought leadership programme dedicated to helping large organizations reimagine their organizations and leadership for a technology-driven future. Simon is also lead practitioner for LEFs Wardley Maps Advisory service which helps client anticipate market and ecosystem developments so they know where to go and why. Simon’s focus is on strategic play both at an industrial and global level. He is the author of multiple reports including Clash of the Titans: Can China Dethrone Silicon Valley?, a pioneer in the use of topographical intelligence within business, a former executive and an advisory board member for several successful start-ups. He has twice been voted as one of the UK's top 50 most influential people in technology. Simon has spent the last 20 years defining future strategies for companies in the FMCG, Retail and Technology industries. He is a passionate advocate in the fields of strategic play, organizational structure, open source and leadership and is a regular presenter at conferences worldwide.

Vishnu Kannan

Google

Vishnu Kannan is a Senior Software Engineer at Google.