Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
Freddie Heygate is CEO, North America at Just After Midnight, a London-founded managed cloud services and 24/7 digital support company now part of the Ultima group. After spending five years building JAM's Asia-Pacific operations from Singapore, he relocated to Austin, Texas in January 2024 to lead the company's US expansion. With a background spanning digital consultancy, marketing, and business development at agencies including Reading Room and The Drum, Freddie brings over a decade of cross-continental experience helping global brands like Ford, Abbott, and Vodafone keep their digital infrastructure running around the clock.
Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.
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.
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.