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.

Aparna Subramanian is a technologist and cloud-native enthusiast. She started her career as a Software Engineer and has spent most part of her 18 years of experience specializing in Infrastructure and Data Platforms. She serves as co-chair of the “CNCF End User Developer Experience” SIG. She is passionate about building inclusive communities where everyone knows their voices will be heard. She is currently Director of Production Engineering at Shopify where she leads Shopify’s Cloud Native Production Platform. Previously, she was Director of Engineering at VMware where she was a founding member of Tanzu on vSphere, a Kubernetes Platform for the hybrid cloud. When not working, Aparna enjoys baking, gardening, and yoga.

Nikhita is a principal software engineer at VMware and a maintainer of the Kubernetes project. She is the vice chair of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and has won the CNCF Top Committer Award in 2021 for her technical contributions. She was also a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee. Nikhita has been featured in Business Insider as one the ‘top 21 developers transforming Silicon Valley’.

Taylor Dolezal, Head of Ecosystem at CNCF, is an experienced technologist with a passion for cloud native technologies. He has a rich background in software development, infrastructure management, and open source and is deeply committed to community-building and knowledge sharing. Taylor’s presentations are renowned for their technical depth, practical insights, and engaging delivery.

Rimma Iontel is a Chief Architect in Red Hat’s Telecommunications, Entertainment and Media (TME) Technology, Strategy and Execution office. She is responsible for supporting Red Hat’s global ecosystem of customers and partners in Telco. Rimma has over twenty years of experience working in the telecommunications industry. Prior to joining Red Hat, she spent fourteen years at Verizon working on Next Generation Networks initiatives and transitioning to software defined cloud infrastructure.

Marlow is a Cloud Software Architect working on resource management for Kubernetes at Intel. She also is a chair for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG. Marlow has expertise in resource management, the AI/ML Kubernetes cloud compute ecosystem, embedded systems, high performance compute system tools, kernel drivers, tracing libraries, and security. Marlow’s interests lie in optimizing the cloud native ecosystem for both heterogenous systems and also for HPC/AI/ML compute with an eye for both performance and sustainability.

Chair of the Oversight Committee for Green Software Foundation (GSF). In addition, she is co-chair of the Community working group and sits on the Standards and Open-Source working groups with GSF. A Cloud Solution Architect with Microsoft living in Michigan on her Wonderful Tiny Farm – where she practices sustainable and organic market farming in her spare time. Utilizing her 30+ years of expertise in development, Tammy works with Microsoft customers on their cloud journey.

Niki Manoledaki is a Software Engineer at Weaveworks working on various open source cloud native tools. She is an advocate for environmental sustainability initiatives at Weaveworks as well as the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG and GitOps WG. She was previously a maintainer of eksctl, the official AWS EKS CLI.

Mahesh Thiagarajan is the Executive Vice President of OCI Security & Developer Platform. His organization’s mission is to simplify developers’ lives by building truly flexible, open, and secure platform. We create distinctive products that make it easy for customers to securely operate their businesses on OCI and modernize their DevOps practices in the cloud. He has been with OCI since its early days and was part of the team that launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure back in 2016. During his time at OCI, he has been involved in strategic planning and numerous product launches involving Compute, Databases, Big Data, as well as Microsoft and VMWare partnerships at OCI. Prior to Oracle, he was at Microsoft Azure and was part of the early team that launched Azure IaaS in 2012. Later, he contributed to the launch of Azure IaaS under Resource Manager in 2015.

Laurent Bernaille worked several years as a consultant specializing in cloud, containers, and automation and helped organizations migrate to the public cloud, adopt containers and improve their deployment pipelines. He is now Staff Engineer at Datadog and works in the Compute team, which is responsible for setting up and scaling Kubernetes platforms. Laurent has given several talks on the topic of containers in conferences such as Dockercon, Open Source Summit, Lisa, Velocity or Kubecon.

Hemanth Malla is a Senior Software Engineer working on Kubernetes and container networking at Datadog. He is also a Cilium CNCF maintainer. Previously he worked on various distributed systems in industries like e-commerce, fintech and high frequency trading. Apart from computers, he enjoys all things photography, drones and dark chocolate.

You are not immune! Given recent security breach events and the fact that the cloud is the #1 target for cyber-attacks, this should be obvious.  In a world where 90% of companies believe Kubernetes is primed for stateful workloads, and 70% already run them in production, the risks are real and present. 
This session provides a compelling argument to discover the criticality of Kubernetes Data Protection, and why it should be top of mind for every DevOps practitioner and cloud leader. Let’s redefine the narrative – containers might be ephemeral, but your business’s resilience cannot afford to be. 
Intrigued? Join us post-keynote for an in-depth panel discussion at our booth. Engage with industry experts like Nigel Poulton, as they delve into the nuances of K8s data resiliency. 
 
We invite you to step forward, understand the shifts, and lead the way in building a resilient Kubernetes ecosystem. Let’s co-create the future, together.

Tim has spent most of his career at Google, where he works on Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). He is one of the technical leads of the Kubernetes project, and has been part of it since before it was publicly announced. He mostly pays attention to topics like APIs, networking, storage, nodes, multi-cluster, resource isolation, and cluster sharing.

Angel is passionate about helping self-empowered engineering teams drive success through digital transformation. An industry thought leader in connecting developers through code, content and community, Angel is an open-source pioneer and one of its biggest proponents. Prior to Discover, Angel served as the Global Director of Engineering for Technology at EY. He also held multiple roles in his 22-year tenure with IBM, including Vice President of Developer Technology. At IBM, Angel was co-founder of the Call for Code Global Challenge and established the company as a leading contributor to several open-source technologies.

Nathan is a Sr. Product Manager on the AWS Kubernetes team. Nathan has been part of the launch teams for several AWS container services and currently helps to set the vision and direction for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS’ managed Kubernetes service. He works closely with AWS customers, partners, and engineering teams that are adopting and building for Kubernetes in the cloud. Nathan lives with his wife and two dogs in Seattle and spends his time outside of the office sailing, sculling, and hiking. Nathan gave talks at re:Invent 2018 and 2019, AWS Santa Clara and New York Summits, and the AWS container days at Kubecon EU and San Diego 2019. He’s a regular speaker on AWS webinars and Twitch.

David Eads is a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat and co-lead for Kubernetes sig-apimachinery and TL for sig-auth.

Heba is a software engineer on the AKS team. She is an active OSS contributor for various Kubernetes SIGs and a member of the k8s community. She was part of the 1.18,1.24,1.25,1.27, and 1.28 release teams and was a Bug Triage lead for the 1.25 release. Also, she worked as a Java developer for 10+ years. Heba graduated from Computer Engineering Cairo University, Egypt. Heba lives with her two adorable daughters. She loves music, cooking. https://www.cncf.io/humans-of-cloud-native/heba-elayoty/

Duffie is Field CTO at Isovalent focused on helping enterprises find success with Cilium and modern security tooling. Duffie has been working with all things systems and networking for 20 years and remembers most of it. A student of perspective, Duffie is always interested in working through problems and design choices from more than one perspective. He grew up in Maui and likes big cats. You can find him everywhere as @mauilion.

Pushkar Joglekar wears multiple hats in the community as: CNCF Security – TAG Co-Chair & Kubernetes SIG Security Tooling Sub-Project Lead to “Make Kubernetes Secure For All”. Since 2019, he feels incredibly fortunate to have written the security chapters in Nigel Poulton’s “The Kubernetes Book” which he looks forward to updating every year. In his free time, he loves taking photos, watching cricket and firmly believes that Chai fixes everything! Pushkar is based in San Francisco Bay Area!

Catherine Paganini is co-chair of the TAG Contributor Strategy, a founding member of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing WG, co-creator of the Cloud Native Glossary, and Head of Marketing at Buoyant, the creator of Linkerd. A marketing leader passionate about open source, Catherine started her CNCF engagement by creating resources that educate non-technical audiences and people new to open source — resources she wished she had when she got started in cloud native. Today, she’s focusing her volunteer efforts on empowering deaf and hard of hearing individuals to become more visible and active community members.

A deaf web developer and Co-Chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. Passionate about improving accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and It my mission to educate the community about what it means to be deaf in tech and how to be more inclusive. Still new to cloud native and open source. I recently started my learning journey and can’t wait to learn more about the ecosystem. 

Jeremy Rickard is a principal software engineer at Microsoft, where he works on supply chain security projects in the Azure Container Upstream team. He is also a chair for SIG Release, a co-chair for the Long Term Support (LTS) working group, and was the release lead for Kubernetes 1.20. He previously worked on Kubernetes platforms at Apple and VMware.

Currently responsible for product and solutions marketing at Veritas, Chris Wiborg draws upon his 20+ years of experience as an IT practitioner and consultant to help drive an understanding of how organizations can derive more business value from disruptive technology innovations.
Over his career he has introduced and accelerated market adoption of a range of solutions, from SaaS-based end user software, to developer-centric open-source offerings, to infrastructure that powers organizations of all sizes: whether on-premises or from the cloud.

A frequently requested speaker and recovering Enterprise IT Architect, Mr. Wiborg holds several technology patents relating to middleware and RFID.

Cailyn Edwards (she/her) is a Senior infrastructure Security Engineer at Shopify, where she spends her time paving roads, putting up guard rails and generally helping to secure the cloud. She is also an active contributor to SIG-Security and 2022 Contributor Award recipient. Her current focus is on network, and Kubernetes multi-tenancy security. Outside of work Cailyn can be found running, playing squash, walking her dogs or working in the garden.

Mukulika Kapas is Director of Product Management at Intuit. She leads product management for development services and experiences on which all Intuit products are built and run leveraging cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, Istio, OpenTelemetry on public Cloud. She has many years of developer platform, tools and OSS experience and is the founding member of CNCF open source project Argo.