DevOps Building Blocks: Building on the Shoulders of DevOps Giants

Alan is founder, CEO & editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, the company behind DevOps.com, Container Journal, Security Boulevard and Digital Anarchist, as well as co-founder of the DevOps Institute. As such, he is attuned to the world of technology, particularly cloud, DevOps, security and open source. With almost 30 years of entrepreneurial experience, Alan has been instrumental in the success of several organizations. He is an often-cited personality in the security and technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. In addition to his writing, his DevOps Chats podcast, DevOps TV and Digital Anarchist audio and videos are widely followed. Alan attributes his success to a combination of a strong business background and a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality. He is a graduate of St. John's University with a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics, and holds a JD degree from NY Law School.

Mitchell Ashley is a renowned strategist and technology executive. Mitchell has led successful IT, SaaS, and cybersecurity transformations. He’s led multiple teams in developing and bringing to market successful online services, cybersecurity, and networking products and services. Mitch serves as Principal of Techstrong Research where he leads a team of preeminent experts in digital transformation, DevOps, cloud-native, and cybersecurity. In this role, Mitch works with companies to align digital transformation and technology strategies to achieve disruptive goals and high impact results. Mitch is in high demand as a speaker at conferences the world over, and his popular DevOps Chats podcast engaging with digital leaders is one of the most widely followed in the field.

The IT management experience of John Willis spans over 40 years. Currently, he works at a startup called Kosli that focuses on modern governance. He has worked as a consultant and evangelist for Red Hat and Docker. Willis previously founded Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell). He was the VP of Training & Services at Chef before joining Enstratius, where he formalized the company’s training, evangelism, and professional services functions. Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner specializing in Tivoli technology deployment, was also founded by Willis. He is the co-author of the DevOps Handbook and Investments Unlimited. Over the past 40 years, he has written 12 books and built 12 startups with three successful exits.

Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps, Member of the Academy of Technology A Distinguished Engineer within the IBM organization, Rosalind is Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps. She is responsible for driving the DevOps for multi-platform architecture; this includes System z and Power system.

Damon Edwards is senior director, product at PagerDuty. Previously, Damon was a co-founder of Rundeck, the makers of the popular open source runbook automation platform acquired by PagerDuty in 2020. Prior to Rundeck, Damon was the managing partner of DTO Solutions, a DevOps and operations improvement consultancy. Damon has spent the past 23 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT operations. He is known for being a leader in porting cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE and operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.