Speakers

Ali is a technologist with over 20 years of experience in disruptive technologies which includes DevOps, security and mobility. Ali started his career at CA Technologies as a presales engineer. After CA, Ali worked for SAP where he held multiple technical and management positions for 10 years working on the mobile secure product. In his last position at CA Technologies, Ali was responsible for leading the NA presales team for their Mobility Business Unit. He was also an advisor to the mobility engineering team for taking their SAAS product and moving into containers. Ali Now works for Aqua Security as a Sr. Solutions Architect Director – North America.

Andy spent his early career in enterprise IT for the public sector. At Google he's held roles in solutions engineering, product management, and technical product marketing. Andy is passionate about helping enterprises navigate the cloud-native landscape, these days spending most of his energy on go-to-market programs and strategic partnerships in the containers/Kubernetes space.

Before joining GitLab Brandon founded and built the Google Cloud ecosystem that includes technology companies as diverse as Red Hat, Docker, Cloudera, Pivotal and Tableau as well as companies with deep cloud expertise like Cloud Technology Partners, Agosto, CI&T, Accenture and McKinsey. He originally hails from Denver but has since lived in Oklahoma (for undergrad in computer science and finance), Houston, New York, Dallas, Chicago where he received his MBA from Kellogg and is now back in Denver with his wife and three children.

Jason has been helping companies build scalable infrastructure since 1999. He started his Ops journey in the ".com era", building and automating systems at Mp3.com. From there he moved on to large traditional infrastructure companies like Intuit and AT&T. A few years ago, Jason went back to his startup roots. As Director of DevOps Architecture for LeanKit he took the lessons learned from large infrastructure companies and helped them adopt modern cloud and container technologies and a DevOps culture. Jason now brings his passion for DevOps and real-world container and orchestration experience to Rancher Labs.

Jason van Brackel is a Senior Solutions Architect for Rancher. He is also the organizer of the Kubernetes Philly Meetup and loves teaching at code camps, user groups and other meetups. Having worked professionally with everything from COBOL to Go, Jason loves learning, and solving challenging problems.

John Michaelson is the Director of Partner Integrations at Aqua Security. John has been involved with building, securing and managing enterprise networks and systems for 20 years. In his current role at Aqua he is responsible for partner product integrations: GKE, IBM CP, PCF, PKS, AKE, ACI, EKS, VIC, Fargate and OpenShift are examples of scope. He also provides Aqua Security customers a conduit into Aqua R&D.

Kashif Zaidi, is an experienced Senior Principal Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry. Skilled in Requirements Analysis, SaAS, API Mangement, Analytics, Sales, & Pre-Sales and a strong consulting professional. Kashif is currently a Sr. Solutions Architect at Aqua, where he works to educate organizations on the importance of container security and enable them to improve their security through DevSecOps.

Priyanka Sharma is the Director of Cloud-Native Alliances at GitLab Inc. She also works on the OpenTracing project, an instrumentation standard for distributed tracing. A former entrepreneur with a passion for building developer products and growing them through open source communities, Priyanka advises startups at HeavyBit industries, an accelerator for developer products. Priyanka holds a BA in political science from Stanford University.

Shannon Williams is a co-founder of Rancher Labs, and leads the company’s world-wide go-to-market initiatives. Shannon is a member of the Governing Board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and a frequent speaker on cloud computing, Kubernetes, DevOps and containerization. Prior to starting Rancher, Shannon was Vice President of Market Development at Citrix Systems, after the company acquired Cloud.com, where he led worldwide sales. Shannon has been part of the founding team at six startups and is a graduate of The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Zach spent the first part of his career in consulting and has been with Google Cloud for five years. He's been on a mission since 2011 to bring the public cloud to traditional enterprises. Today, he focuses on hybrid and multi-cloud solutions built on Kubernetes. Zach is based in Austin, Texas.