Neha Narkhede is co-founder and CTO at Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform. Prior to founding Confluent, Neha led streams infrastructure at LinkedIn, where she was responsible for LinkedIn’s streaming infrastructure built on top of Apache Kafka and Apache Samza. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and a committer and PMC member on the project.

Chris Richardson is a developer and architect. Chris was also the founder of the original CloudFoundry.com, an early Java PaaS for Amazon EC2. Today, he is a recognized thought leader in microservices and speaks regularly at international conferences. Chris is the creator of Microservices.io, a pattern language for microservices, and is writing the book Microservice Patterns, which is available as a Manning MEAP.

Chad Fowler is an experienced developer, leader, author, and musician. He currently leads startup developer advocacy for Microsoft, where he has worked since the acquisition of Wunderlist in 2015, for which he served as CTO. Chad is one of the early industry adopters of microservices and immutable infrastructure, a term which he coined to describe the radical approach Wunderlist took to infrastructure and code management.

Shobhana is responsible for a global organization that provides IT operations and services support for an exploding business. She leads both the strategic and tactical support for Uber worldwide corporate infrastructure components, network and telecommunications, enterprise applications, endpoints and a 24×7 internal service desk. Prior to joining Uber, Shobhana served as vice president of Information Technology at Rocket Fuel, where she created and scaled a global IT team to support Rocket Fuel’s rapid business growth. Until 2013, Shobhana held various roles at CBS, including the vice president of enterprise resource planning and IT at CBS, where she led internal technology for all 10 of CBS’s business units including Network, CBS Studios, and Simon & Schuster.

Vijay Narayanan is a Tech Fellow at Goldman Sachs and has 16+ years of experience building software systems and multi-tenant platforms. Vijay is focused on hybrid cloud adoption, infrastructure-as-code, and API Gateway and API lifecycle management. Prior to his current role, Vijay was a Principal Engineer in Amazon focusing on distributed event stream processing, application resilience, and self-service management consoles for eCommerce platform services. He has a Bachelors & Masters in Information Systems from Drexel University, Philadelphia.

Erin McKean is the founder of the not-for-profit Wordnik.com, the world’s biggest online dictionary. Before founding Wordnik, she was the editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Erin is the author of three Weird and Wonderful Words books, the best-selling novel The Secret Lives of Dresses, and (most recently) The Hundred Dresses, a field guide to dresses. She’s written regular columns for The Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, PAPER, Foreign Affairs, and Sew News.

Christian Posta is a chief architect of cloud applications at Red Hat and well-known in the community for being an author (Introducing Istio Service Mesh, O’Reilly 2018, microservices for Java Developers, O’Reilly 2016), frequent blogger, speaker, open-source enthusiast and committer on various open-source projects including Istio, Apache ActiveMQ, Fabric8, et.al. Christian has spent time at web-scale companies and now helps companies create and deploy large-scale, resilient, distributed architectures - many of what we now call Microservices. He enjoys mentoring, training and leading teams to be successful with distributed systems concepts, microservices, devops, and cloud-native application design.

Alexandra Noonan is a software engineer for Segment, a provider of customer data infrastructure. She helped create and currently maintains Centrifuge, Segment’s main data pipeline that reliably sends billions of messages per day to hundreds of public APIs. She is a self-taught coder and prior to her current role, was a customer success analyst at the company.

Kolton is co-founder and CEO of Gremlin. Previously, he was a chaos engineer at Netflix, improving streaming reliability and operating the edge services. He designed and built F.I.T., Netflix’s failure injection service. Prior, he improved the performance and reliability of the Amazon Retail website. At both companies, he has served as a ‘Call Leader,’ managing the resolution of company-wide incidents.

Jessica is a Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft focusing on Azure, Containers, cloud, OSS, and, of course, DevOps. Prior to joining Microsoft, she spent over a decade as an IT Consultant / Systems Administrator for various corporate and enterprise environments, catering to end users and IT professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jessica holds two Microsoft Certifications (MCP, MSTS), 3 CompTIA certifications (A+, Network+, and Security+), 4 Apple Certifications, and is a former 4-year Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows and Devices for IT. In 2013, she also achieved her FEMA certification from the U.S Department of Homeland Security, which recognizes her leadership and influence abilities during times of crisis and emergency.

Guillermo Rauch is the founder of ZEIT, co-creator of Now and Next.js, and former CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Wordpress.com in 2013. Guillermo's background and expertise is in the realtime web. He's the creator of socket.io, one of the most popular JavaScript projects on GitHub. He's spoken at dozens of conferences all around the world about JavaScript and the realtime web. ​He's the author of "Smashing Node.JS" published by Wiley in 2012, a best-selling book about Node.JS.

Komal Mangtani is passionate about advocating for women in tech. As the head of engineering for Business Intelligence at Uber, she oversees the technical solutions that ensure customer satisfaction and secure financial systems. She also acts in an advisory capacity for the #LadyEng group at Uber, serves on the board of Women Who Code, and is leading a partnership with Girls Who Code to expand Girls Who Code Clubs programs and increase girls’ awareness of and access to computer science.

Joseph was the founder and organizer of KubeCon (the Kubernetes community conference, donated to and now run by the Linux Foundation's CNCF). He also co-founded Kismatic (the first commercial open source Kubernetes tools and services company), acquired by Apprenda in 2016. Joseph previously worked at Enstratius Networks (acquired by Dell Software), TIBCO Software, and Talend (2016 IPO). He was also previously a founding strategy and product consultant at Mesosphere.

Dennis Kelly is a Senior DevOps Engineer responsible for driving the multi-brand API management strategy for Zillow Group. An innovator and adventurer, Dennis has been dubbed by peers as "The Diesel." He implemented the first-ever, resort-wide integration of the RTP-SKIDATA RFID lift access system at Stevens Pass Mountain Resort and has been featured in the NSAA Journal. He’s a graduate of Michigan State University with degrees in Computer Science and Telecommunications, and a certified AWS Solutions Architect who has spent the last 20 years trying to automate himself out of a job, albeit unsuccessfully.

Marcelo is an architect and developer at McAfee, and an early adopter of both Kong and Kubernetes. He's currently working on McAfee Investigator, a cloud-based machine learning solution for incident responders. As a security expert, Marcelo has contributed to identity standards such as User Managed Access, holds several patents and publications on device authentication and pairing using QR codes, and he also designed and built the first version of spamina.com (a cloud-based email security solution, now operating for over 15 years).

Gwen is a principal data architect at Confluent helping customers achieve success with their Apache Kafka implementation. She has 15 years of experience working with code and customers to build scalable data architectures, integrating microservices, relational and big data technologies. Gwen is an author of “Kafka - the Definitive Guide”, a committer on Apache Kafka project, and a frequent presenter at industry conferences.