Mirko, co-founder and former CEO of Instana, led the Application Performance Management company for microservices to its successful acquisition by IBM in late 2020. In May 2023, he co-founded Dash0, an OpenTelemetry-native observability solution, furthering his contributions to the observability field. An active angel investor, Mirko supports over 60 tech startups, showcasing his dedication to fostering innovation and emerging technologies.   Follow Mirko on Linkedin and X. 

In this engaging discussion, Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker and Dagger.io, shares his remarkable journey in tech. He dives into the challenges he faced while scaling Docker and reveals how Dagger is revolutionizing continuous integration by addressing traditional CI tool limitations. The conversation highlights the importance of community support and innovative solutions for enhancing software development processes. Hykes also discusses how emerging tech like AI is shaping the future of DevOps practices.

Daniel Bryant is the Head of Product Marketing at Syntasso. His technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms, and microservice implementations. Daniel is a long-time coder, platform engineer, and Java Champion, contributing to several open-source projects. He also writes for InfoQ, O’Reilly, and The New Stack and regularly presents at international conferences such as KubeCon, QCon, and JavaOne. In his copious free time, he enjoys running, reading, and traveling.

Ellen is a Partner at boldstart. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies. Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work. Ellen has an a M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She grew up in Rochester Hills, MI, but now lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and her cat, Gutenberg.

Elizabeth K. Joseph, IBM Z developer advocate, and Holger Wolf discuss running Kubernetes on mainframes, debunking misconceptions, exploring open-source mainframe community dynamics, and IBM's role in the open source community and acquisitions.

Chris Bailey, IBM CTO for Instana, discusses evolving from Java to Node.js, cloud-native development with Kubernetes, and utilizing AI for efficient IT operations. He explores monitoring tools for dynamic scale, distinguishing vendor capabilities, and managing complex technologies in modern architecture.

Ben Sigelman is the General Manager of ServiceNow Cloud Observability, which solves for the reliability and performance of cloud and cloud-native applications while broadening the scope and leverage of the broader Now Platform. Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Lightstep, which ServiceNow acquired in 2021, and co-created both the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. Ben also helped define modern observability with his work on tracing and metrics monitoring at Google (the Monarch and Dapper projects) and was a pioneer in SRE best practices and tooling. He holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

BJ Badyk is a human who desires an easier life. Nerd from birth, his curiosity led him down a path through the start of ISPs, Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble, the last few years of the Playboy brand, and into the world of Adtech. He currently runs the platform engineering team at Nexxen, where they work on unique ways of handling millions of requests per second with Kubernetes. The team was an early adopter of Talos Linux, which they now run at scale. He presented at TalosCon 2023 and continues to pursue simple solutions to complex problems. In his free time, he can be found listening to synth-wave, motorcycling, or roaming around the woods with his ham radios. ------------ TalosCon 2023: https://youtu.be/WpE1EyB3fSE Nexxen: https://nexxen.com Find BJ @ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjbadyk YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/transmissions

Ashan Senevirathne is an experienced Product Owner and Senior DevOps Engineer with a proven track record in driving innovation and efficiency in telecommunications. Currently with Swisscom, leading the development of a cloud-native orchestration framework for 5G Core using Kubernetes. Adept at optimizing release engineering processes, championing CI/CD workflows, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Recognized for his expertise in Kubernetes, GitOps, cloud-native principles, and network orchestration. Joel Studler is a DevOps Engineer who currently works in a team that builds the cloud native 5G core at Swisscom. He is experienced in infrastructure automation, software-defined networking, and highly available databases. He is CK* certified and has written several CRD/Operator-based Kubernetes extensions. He is passionate about automation and user experience to make everyday life easier. Outside the tech sphere, he is an active musician both live and in the studio. Ashan & Joel's talk at KubeCon EU 2024: How We Are Moving from GitOps to Kubernetes Resource Model in 5G Core is now available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/crmTnB6Zwt8?si=I7QofgXQpc5n40y0

A long-time open-source programmer and entrepreneur, Gabriele has a degree in Statistics from the University of Florence. After having consistently contributed to the growth of 2ndQuadrant and its members through nurturing a lean and DevOps culture, he is now leading the Cloud Native initiative at EDB. Gabriele lives in Prato, a small but vibrant city located in the northern part of Tuscany, Italy - famous for having hosted the first European PostgreSQL conferences. His second home is Melbourne, Australia, where he studied at Monash University and worked in the ICT sector. He loves playing the Blues with his Fender Stratocaster, but his major passions are called Elisabeth and Charlotte! Follow Gabriele on Twitter and Linkedin