Keynote Speakers

Priyanka is the General Manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. She was previously the director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab Inc., where she built the developer evangelism team that participates regularly in the cloud native community.

Priyanka also serves as an advisor at Heavybit Industries, an accelerator for developer products. She has contributed to several CNCF projects such as Jaeger and Vitess and was a founding team member of the OpenTracing standard. In addition, Priyanka is a leading speaker and subject matter expert on cloud native and observability and has spoken about Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, OpenTracing, Envoy, Vitess, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and more. She was a startup founder featured at TechCrunch Disrupt and started her career at Google.

Frederick collaborates on security and networking. He is on the SPIFFE Steering Committee, focusing on providing Zero Trust Workload Identity to compute workloads and resources. Frederick co-authored Solving the Bottom Turtle. He is a co-founder of OmniBOR and maintains the reference Go implementation. He is a co-founder and maintainer of Network Service Mesh. Prior work includes creating the initial definition of Cloud-Native Network Function and initiating Red Hat Container Storage Engine.

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 12 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. A member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, and North America 2022, she is involved in a variety of open source communities.

Guess what? Emily is NOT A DEVELOPER – She is a Security Engineer with lots of exposure to development and sustainment.

Ricardo is a Computing Engineer in the CERN cloud team focusing on containerized deployments, networking, and more recently machine learning platforms. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a leader of the CNCF Research User Group, as well as a CNCF TOC member. Prior to this work, Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Shatarupa Nandi is an engineering leader focused on software distribution and lifecycle management problems with a strong emphasis on improving Day 2 operational experiences. Her interest follows naturally from past work building infrastructure management tools and tools for running data services in the cloud, where she experienced first-hand the challenges that operators face keeping databases and applications up-to-date in large scale production deployments. Today, as an R&D director at VMware, Shatarupa leads a team that is collaborating openly to solve these problems with Kubernetes through the open source Carvel project.

Le Tran has been a member of the technical staff at Kasten by Veeam since October 2021 and is new to cloud native development. Prior to joining Kasten, she worked in the automotive embedded systems industry as a software engineer. She led a team that launched new surround view camera systems in the latest car fleets and had worked on various driver assistant and autonomous driving technologies. While at Bosch, Le gathered extensive experience as a trainer, leading numerous courses on autonomous driving technologies. She also presented semi-annually to teams on various technologies and projects that she had worked on.

Ayse Kaya is the Senior Director of Strategy and Analytics at Slim.AI. She is an accredited data scientist and container enthusiast. A graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Operations Research Center, Kaya was previously a strategy and analytics lead at CloudLock and Cisco Systems. Ayse Kaya lives in Boston with her daughter. She is an avid runner and student of philosophy.

Whitney is a full stack developer who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. She is active in the open source community, especially around CNCF projects focused on developer productivity. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV. And not only does she rock at tech – she literally has toured playing in the band Mutual Benefit on keyboards and vocals.

Mauricio is currently working at the Knative OSS Project as part of the VMWare MAPBU team. He is the author of the Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes book for Manning and he is passionate about Open Source, Cloud Native and Kubernetes. You can always get in touch with him via Twitter @Salaboy.

Cathy is a senior principal engineer at Intel, spearheading the development of high-performance cloud native SW stacks and solutions. She is responsible for shaping the company’s cloud-native strategy and roadmap, and driving the company-wide contributions to CNCF projects/TAGs/WGs and Kubernetes SIGs. She has over 20 years of software design and development experience in a wide range of areas such as serverless, large-scale distributed VM/container orchestration and scheduling, edge computing, container runtime, service mesh, software-defined networking, and high availability. Cathy has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering and holds 18 US granted patents with another 11 pending in the US patent office pipeline.

As a member of the CNCF TOC, she is an active contributor to the cloud-native computing ecosystem. Cathy has served as a track chair for several KubeCon events and OpenStack summits.

Erin is currently the Director of Emerging Technologies  and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat in the Office of the CTO. Erin was previously an Apple Cloud Services Engineer at Apple. Erin is a Kubernetes contributor and an Apache Ambari committer. Erin is an active contributor to the Kubernetes Storage SIG and is currently the co-chair of the CNCF Storage SIG. Erin’s main focus today is centered around how to enable storage in a stateless, hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Prior to working at Red Hat, she worked at IBM for 14 years. Erin worked in embedded systems development for several years before moving into global enterprise level services. Erin lives outside of Bozeman, MT with her husband and 5 children. She is a robot enthusiast and FIRST robotics mentor. Her family owns and runs a karate dojo in which they volunteer a considerable amount of time to teaching and empowering all people, especially women and children. And in what spare time she has, she runs marathons.

John Morello is the former Chief Technology Officer at Twistlock, and the current VP or Prisma at Palo Alto Networks. As CTO, John leads the work with strategic customers and partners and drives the product roadmap. Prior to Twistlock, John was the CISO of Albemarle, a Fortune 500 global chemical company. Before that, John spent 14 years at Microsoft, in both Microsoft Consulting Services and product teams. He ran feature teams that shipped security technologies in Windows, Azure, and Office 365 and served as the Lead Architect of the hybrid cloud consulting team for the Americas. John lives in Louisiana with his wife and two young sons. A passionate fisherman and scuba diver, he also serves as Chairman of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

Alvin Estrada is a Cloud Engineer, with multiple years of experience helping companies to adopt Cloud Native technologies and DevOps culture to improve their product development lifecycle.

Speaker and organizer at Kubernetes Guatemala (a CNCF group) and Kong Meetup Guatemala, where he shares about Cloud Native Technologies, Software and DevOps culture, active member at multiple CNCF communities in Latin America

Stephen is a Black engineering director and leader in open source communities.

He is Cisco’s first Head of Open Source, within the Emerging Technologies & Incubation division.

For Kubernetes, he has co-founded transformational elements of the project, including the KEP (Kubernetes Enhancements Proposal) process, the Release Engineering subproject, and Working Group Naming. Stephen has also previously served as a chair for both SIG PM and SIG Azure.

He continues his work in Kubernetes as a Chair for SIG Release, a Lead for WG Naming, and an owner of Enhancements subproject.

Across the wider CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) ecosystem, Stephen has the pleasure of being one of the Program Chairs for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference, a SIG Contributor Strategy Chair, and a maintainer for the Dex project.

He is a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 25 (as of writing) code/content committers, all-time.

In 2020, Stephen co-founded the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a cross-industry group dedicated to helping projects and companies make consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language across codebases, standards, and documentation. He leads multiple workstreams here and maintains the initiative’s infrastructure.

He has previously held positions at VMWare (via Heptio), Red Hat, and CoreOS.

Stephen is based in New York City.

When not poking holes at test plans, he can usually be found working on upstream Kubernetes in various sub-projects or posting an unhealthy amount of GIFs on Twitter. He is a Goose Enthusiast and enjoys referring to himself as a Michigander (though has relocated to Minnesota)

Bob is a Program Manager at the Google Open Source Programs Office with a focus on Cloud Native computing. He serves the Kubernetes project as a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, a chair of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group and has been involved in many other cross-cutting areas of the project. Bob comes from an academic background, spending 15 years at the University of Michigan with a later focus on computational research. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador, Bob has worked towards improving High Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and other research initiatives by integrating them with Cloud Native practices and tooling. He is passionate about Academic Outreach, and is an outspoken advocate of Open Source, Open Science and pets of the furry 4 legged variety.