Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.
Justin Garrison is a platform engineering veteran who helped launch Disney+ from zero to 50 million subscribers, spent 3.5+ years as a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS working on EKS, and now serves as Head of Product at Sidero Labs. He co-authored 'Cloud Native Infrastructure' with O'Reilly, hosts the Ship It! and Fork Around and Find Out podcasts, and is one of the original chairs of the Kubernetes SIG on-prem. He's known for critical, no-hype takes on cloud native trends and a deep commitment to open source community.
Kelsey Hightower is one of the most recognized figures in cloud-native computing - a self-taught engineer who rose from sleeping in his car to becoming a Distinguished Engineer (L9) at Google. Co-author of 'Kubernetes: Up and Running' and creator of the legendary 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' tutorial, he spent nearly a decade evangelizing Kubernetes and cloud-native practices before retiring from Google in 2023. Known for his disarming candor, human-first philosophy, and gift for making complex infrastructure accessible, Kelsey now serves as Board Director at Civo and continues to shape the future of platform engineering, AI, and open source sustainability.
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.