Kubernetes for Humans

Joshua Burgin is a seasoned product and technology executive with a track record of building profitable businesses and high-performance teams in both startups and established companies. He specializes in growing diverse, mission-driven organizations who ship technology products that delight customers & deliver business results.

Currently, as the VP of Product & Strategy for VMware’s multi-billion-dollar Product & Cloud Services business, he leads initiatives in customer experience, software engineering consistency, onboarding, lifecycle management, devops, and security. Joshua also collaborates with the CEO, COO, CTO, and the senior leadership team to address operational, strategic, and corporate integration challenges.

Prior to joining VMWare in 2022, he spent nearly 8 years at AWS in a variety of executive roles, most recently as the General Manager for the AWS Outposts business, responsible for engineering, product management, design, marketing and business development. Before Outposts, Joshua worked as Chief of Staff & Technical Advisor to AWS’s most senior executives – Charlie Bell and Andy Jassy – tracking key industry trends, formulating strategy, and developing in-depth solutions to business & technical challenges. From 2014-2019, Joshua was a Director/General Manager in Compute Services, where he was responsible for multiple lines of business, including EC2 Spot, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans, Auto Scaling and Private Pricing. During this time, he sponsored and led the successful acquisitions of ClusterK, Thinkbox & Nimble Collective – playing a pivotal role in driving the post-acquisition integration, launch and growth of new AWS services based on the acquired companies’ technology.

From 2000-2014, he held product and technology executive roles at several startups, including Zynga, where he drove the development of their in-game advertising platform, increasing Ad revenue from under $5M to $150M/year, a 600% increase in under 3 years.

Joshua began his career in 1997 as one of Amazon’s first 100 employees, one of Amazon’s first 100 employees, working as a software engineer when the company only sold books online, and the entire staff fit on a single floor of an office building. He is a named inventor on over 20 patents and is in high demand by the media, often invited as a keynote speaker at global conferences focused on innovation, DevOps, and cloud computing. In his spare time, he advises several early-stage startups and occasionally shares thoughts and insights via his Substack.

Outside of the office, Joshua enjoys exploring new cuisines and traveling around the world with his wife and two children. At home, their household is a lively one, bustling with the antics of their beloved dog and cat.

Special KubeCon episode with Josh Rosso, Principal Engineer at Reddit. An experienced software engineer, author (Production Kubernetes, O'Reilly), and technical lead specializing in infrastructure and backend systems. Formerly worked on early Kubernetes at both CoreOS (acquired by RedHat) and Heptio (acquired by VMware).

Don't miss out on Josh speaking at KubeCon NA '23 about Nix, Kubernetes, and the Pursuit of Reproducibility! Sched link: https://sched.co/1R2wJ

Jack of all trades master of None. Alexandru Dejanu is a Senior Systems Engineer with 8 years of experience in various domains such as Automotive, Telecom, Banking, and Healthcare. Currently, he works as an SRE at Systematic, part of the Customer Operations team, helping both development and operation teams to have full visibility of the complete application lifecycle. Opinionated and tech agnostic, loves helping others and sharing knowledge be it on StackOverflow, HackerNoon, or Medium.

Todd Palino is a Senior Staff Engineer in Site Reliability at LinkedIn on the Capacity Engineering team, where his team is creating a framework for application capacity measurement, analysis, and change intelligence. Prior to that, he was responsible for architecture, day-to-day operations, and tools development for one of the largest Apache Kafka deployments. In his spare time, Todd is the developer of the open-source project Burrow, a Kafka consumer monitoring tool, and is the co-author of Kafka: The Definitive Guide, now available from O'Reilly Media. Out of the office, you can find Todd at conferences like SREcon and LISA, sharing his experience from years in SRE technical leadership, and at Kafka Summit or ApacheCon talking about how to feed and water Kafka infrastructures. Or maybe out on the trails, training for the next marathon.

Nick is a CNCF and OpenUK Ambassador, currently employed as Head of Cloud Native and Platform Engineering at EscherCloudAI, where he's helping to build a next-generation managed Kubernetes service tailored for AI workloads backed by a sustainable approach to running infrastructure. He is also a serial meetup organizer, including Cloud Native and Kubernetes Edinburgh, CNK Manchester, as well as larger events such as Kubernetes Community Days UK. Nick is passionate about new technology, but simultaneously romantic about the old with a penchant for decrepit Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems hardware.

• KCD UK 2023: https://kcduk.io

Gwen Shapira is the Co-Founding CPO at Nile. Previously a system architect at Confluent (employee no. 12!) helping customers achieve success with their Apache Kafka implementation. She has 15 years of experience working with code and customers to build scalable data architectures, integrating relational and big data technologies. She specializes in building real-time reliable data processing pipelines using Apache Kafka. Gwen is an Oracle Ace Director, an author of "Hadoop Application Architectures", and a frequent presenter at data-driven conferences. Gwen is also a committer on the Apache Kafka and Apache Sqoop projects.

Andrew P. McMahon is a data scientist and machine learning engineer with several years of experience leading teams that deliver value using cutting-edge technology. He specializes in helping organizations take their initial machine learning and data proof-of-concept solutions through to production. He led machine learning development in companies working across logistics optimization, distributed energy systems, and now in financial services.

He also has a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from Imperial College London and has been a part-time science consultant for the Discovery Channel. 

His second book on "Machine Learning Engineering with Python" is out now! Get your copy on Amazon: 

• US: https://a.co/d/1dwqSWK 

Sebastian is an award-winning global thought leader for enterprise transformation and a CTO Summit member at CNCF. He is a startup professional who helped to shape products from genesis to market leader with bleeding-edge technology. Always striving to innovate and question the status quo, he helps to break dogmas, implement a new culture, and never settles while pursuing constant progress. Currently, he is leading a competence center in IT infrastructure and aligning all brands in the VW Group with the mission to once again boldly go where no one has gone before.

Wouter is particularly passionate about CICD and everything that involves automation in the tech industry. In the past years, he worked in different countries on projects that involve automating Kubernetes workloads while at the same time speeding up and standardizing the landscape in ING. In his free time, you can occasionally find him on a split-board touring the Romanian mountains

Christoph Held, Cloud Architect at Allianz, is a big enthusiast of Open Source and Kubernetes in particular. His journey with Kubernetes began in 2014 when he became a full-time contributor and took on the leadership of the Dashboard project. Today, in his role at Allianz, Christoph plays a vital part in guiding the company on their cloud journey, leveraging his expertise to build large-scale clusters and DevOps solutions.