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Web Server Load Balancing with NGINX Plus

F5 NGINX Sprint

Speakers

Click on the photos below to learn more about the speakers and their sessions.

Alessandro Fael Garcia

Senior Solutions Engineer, Community & Alliances at NGINX

About Alessandro Fael Garcia:

Alessandro is a Senior Solutions Engineer in the NGINX product group at F5. He empowers engineers in their journey to stay ahead of the curve by using the latest NGINX tech offerings. In his free time, Alessandro enjoys traveling (currently on hold), cooking, and any and all outdoor exercise.

Sessions:

  • Best Practices for Getting Started with NGINX Open Source: August 23, 10:10 AM PST

Alessandro Fael Garcia

Senior Solutions Engineer, Community & Alliances at NGINX

Amir Rawdat

Technical Marketing Engineer II at NGINX

About Amir Rawdat:

Amir is a Technical Marketing Engineer in the NGINX product group at F5. He started his career as a programmer, then moved to reproducing live customer networks in data centers and building software automation tools to accelerate IT operations. Amir has a degree in Computer Engineering and hands-on experience with performance-tuning open source technologies on the Linux operating system.

Sessions:

Amir Rawdat

Technical Marketing Engineer II at NGINX

Brian Ehlert

Director, Product Management at NGINX

About Brian Ehlert:

Brian is a Director of Product Management in the NGINX product group at F5. During his career, Brian has filled roles in telecom, systems engineering, auditing, networking, systems hardening, and disaster recovery, resolving complex, deep, and multi-faceted systems issues. Before joining F5, Brian was a technically focused Product Manager specializing in Microsoft technology in the Microsoft Solutions group at Citrix, where he began as a research test engineer.

Sessions:

  • The Future of Kubernetes Connectivity: August 24, 8:20 AM PST

Brian Ehlert

Director, Product Management at NGINX

Casey Zednick

Casey Zednick

Principal Software Engineer at NGINX

About Casey Zednick:

Casey is the tech lead of the delivery engineering tools team in the NGINX product group at F5. He believes in the power of asking why, meeting his customers where they are, and being data driven, with the goal of ensuring that NGINX developers have a delightful experience. Casey's background spans from startups to public companies, which enables him to be customer focused while understanding larger companies' processes.

Sessions:

  • Why and How to Run Your Own Gitlab Runners as Your Company Grows: August 23, 12:10 PM PST
Casey Zednick

Casey Zednick

Principal Software Engineer at NGINX

Christine Abernathy

Christine Abernathy

Senior Director, Open Source at F5

About Christine Abernathy:

Christine leads the Open Source Programs Office at F5. Christine joined F5 from Facebook (now Meta Platforms) where she was instrumental in growing the company's open source presence. Prior roles included Developer Advocate for Parse, a Facebook platform, and Partner Engineer in the Mobile group. Before Facebook, Christine headed up engineering at Mshift, a mobile banking software provider, delivering iOS/Android apps and mobile browser-based products. Prior experiences include co-founding Clickmarks, a mobile and enterprise middleware provider.

Sessions:

  • F5 Open Source: A Tale in 3 Parts: August 24, 8:05 AM PST
Christine Abernathy

Christine Abernathy

Senior Director, Open Source at F5

Chris Harrison

Christopher Harrison

Enterprise Advocate at GitHub

About Christopher Harrison:

Christopher is a long-time geek who's spent the bulk of his career training, supporting, and up-skilling developers. He's a web developer at heart, with passions which span from Python to DevOps to TypeScript to AI. In his current role as an Enterprise Advocate at GitHub he seeks to help organizations improve their DevOps process and culture. When not found writing code he can be found running, playing Civilization, or spending time with his partner and their four-legged child (a rescue mutt).

Sessions:

  • An Open Source Community Behind Your Firewall – Improving Developer Productivity with InnerSource: August 24, 10:25 AM PST
Chris Harrison

Christopher Harrison

Enterprise Advocate at GitHub

Daniel Kocot

Daniel Kocot

API Expert and Senior Solutions Architect at codecentric AG

About Daniel Kocot:

Daniel joined the team at codecentric's office in Solingen, Germany in October 2016. Initially working as a consultant with a focus on application lifecycle management, his focus shifted more and more towards APIs. In addition to his work on numerous customer projects and involvement in the open source world around APIs, he also speaks frequently as an API expert.

Sessions:

  • Deployable API Infrastructure with NGINX: August 23, 10:30 AM PST
Daniel Kocot

Daniel Kocot

API Expert and Senior Solutions Architect at codecentric AG

Daniel Oh

Daniel Oh

Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat

About Daniel Oh:

Daniel is a Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat to evangelize building cloud-native microservices and serverless functions with cloud-native runtimes (for example, Quarkus, Spring Boot, and Node.js) and OpenShift/Kubernetes. Daniel also continues to contribute to various cloud open source projects and ecosystems as a CNCF ambassador for accelerating DevOps adoption in enterprises. He speaks at lots of technical seminars, workshops, and meetups to elaborate on new emerging technologies for enterprise developers and DevOps teams.

Sessions:

  • Zero to Hero in Kubernetes-Native Java: August 24, 11:15 AM PST
Daniel Oh

Daniel Oh

Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat

Dave McAllister

Dave McAllister

NGINX, OSS Technical Evangelist at NGINX

About Dave McAllister:

Dave works with open source projects in the NGINX product group at F5 to promote the advantages of modern architectures and orchestration for solving the challenges of large-scale distributed systems, especially with today's fast-moving cycles. Dave has been a champion of open systems and open source from the early days of Linux to today's world of clouds and containers. He speaks on topics such as the real-world issues associated with emerging software architectures and practices. Currently, his driving interests are app management, observability, and service mesh. Dave was named as one of the top ten pioneers in open source by Computer Business Review, having cut his teeth on Linux and compilers before the phrase "open source" was coined.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat: The Importance of an Ecosystem: August 23, 8:40 AM PST
  • Future Things: What’s Coming Next And What You Need to Know Right Now: August 23, 11:30 AM PST
Dave McAllister

Dave McAllister

NGINX, OSS Technical Evangelist at NGINX

Elijah Zupancic

Solutions Architect, Community & Alliances at NGINX

About Elijah Zupancic:

Elijah is a Solutions Architect in the NGINX product group at F5, with experience as a software engineer, architect, and technical manager. Elijah has been leading software teams in architectural design, product development, and holistic improvement for over 10 years and loves to geek out about infrastructure, architecture, application composition, service design, and the psychology of making real-world applications work.

Sessions:

  • MARA: The Journey to OpenTelemetry: August 24, 10:05 AM PST

Elijah Zupancic

Solutions Architect, Community & Alliances at NGINX

Eric Braun

Eric Braun

Vice President, Product Management and Commercial Strategy at NGINX

About Eric Braun:

Eric Braun is the Vice President, Product Management and Commercial Strategy for the NGINX product group at F5. He is a veteran of SaaS, PaaS, cloud (IaaS), enterprise software (including virtualization from the OS to containers and workload orchestration), telecommunications, and use cases for emerging AI, ML, and XR solutions as well as connected devices.

Sessions:

  • Inspiring the Journey: From Open Source to Scale Out to Self Service: August 23, 8:20 AM PST
Eric Braun

Eric Braun

Vice President, Product Management and Commercial Strategy at NGINX

Hannah Neil

Hannah Ouellette

Senior OSS Community Manager at NGINX

About Hannah Ouellette:

Hannah Ouellette is the Sr. OSS Community Manager for NGINX. She discovered her passion for OSS community at Kong before serving as community manager at Postman. She learned the importance of gathering together to build connection and share knowledge from her events background. She believes that Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging are crucial to a healthy community. When she is not in front of her computer, she can be found jumping horses super fast or putting together jigsaw puzzles super slow.

Sessions:

  • Welcome to NGINX Sprint!: August 23, 8:00 AM PST
  • Welcome Back to F5 NGINX Sprint: August 24, 8:00 AM PST
Hannah Neil

Hannah Ouellette

Senior OSS Community Manager at NGINX

Jason Schmidt

Jason Schmidt

Solutions Architect, Community & Alliances at NGINX

About Jason Schmidt:

Jason is a Solutions Architect in the NGINX product group at F5 and has experience in operations, development, project management, product management, customer support, field services, and consulting. Jason believes in the power of open source to provide solutions, drive innovation, and increase collaboration while providing significant cost savings. Experience with both startups and large multinational organizations has provided Jason with a wide array of communication skills and a deep understanding of needs and capabilities which are the foundation for finding answers that deliver immediate returns and long-term value.

Sessions:

  • MARA: Scaffolding for Modern Applications: August 24, 8:50 AM PST
  • MARA: The Journey to OpenTelemetry: August 24, 10:05 AM PST
Jason Schmidt

Jason Schmidt

Solutions Architect, Community & Alliances at NGINX

Javier Evans

Javier Evans

Solutions Engineer at NGINX

About Javier Evans:

For the past ten years Javier has worked in companies of various sizes doing product-focused full stack software development. He believes that work at every level of the software stack is relevant to user experience. Come talk to him about NGINX, Elixir, and kindness in software development.

Sessions:

  • Scripting NGINX with njs for Fun and (No) Profit: August 23, 10:50 AM PST
Javier Evans

Javier Evans

Solutions Engineer at NGINX

Javier Perez

Javier Perez

Chief Evangelist - Open Source & Security at Perforce Software

About Javier Perez:

Passionate about technology and open-source software, Javier is Chief Evangelist for Open Source and Security at Perforce Software. He is responsible for technical thought leadership and advocacy for the open-source and application security portfolios. Javier has been in the application development, open-source, cloud, app security, AI, SaaS, and mobile industries for 20+ years, and has had the opportunity to speak at industry events all over the world. Javier holds an honors degree in Computer Systems and an MBA.

Sessions:

  • It’s 2022 – What’s the State of Open Source?: August 23, 9:40 AM PST
Javier Perez

Javier Perez

Chief Evangelist - Open Source & Security at Perforce Software

Jenn Gile

Jenn Gile

Sr Mgr, Product Marketing at NGINX

About Jenn Gile:

Jenn is a Sr Mgr, Product Marketing for F5’s NGINX product group. She leads the go-to-market strategy and execution for NGINX microservices solutions, including NGINX Ingress Controller and NGINX Service Mesh.

Sessions:

  • NGINX 101: Reduce Kubernetes Latency with Autoscaling: August 25, 12:00 PM PST
Jenn Gile

Jenn Gile

Sr Mgr, Product Marketing at NGINX

Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower

Principal Engineer at Google

About Kelsey Hightower:

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.

Sessions:

  • A Journey Through NGINX and Open Source with Kelsey Hightower: August 24, 9:10 AM PST
Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower

Principal Engineer at Google

Kevin Jones

Senior Product Manager at NGINX

About Kevin Jones:

Kevin Jones is Sr. Product Manager at NGINX. As an artist and geek-turned-engineer, he's passionate about technology, teaching others, and helping businesses increase their architectural acumen. At NGINX he is responsible for creating solutions which help customers achieve digital transformation and is heavily involved in the NGINX community as a technical evangelist.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat with Capital One: Building API Infrastructure at Scale: August 24, 8:20 AM PST

Kevin Jones

Senior Product Manager at NGINX

Liam Crilly

Senior Director, Product Management at NGINX

About Liam Crilly:

Liam, a Senior Director of Product Management in the NGINX product group at F5, has 20 years of experience in the Internet industry. He knew the Internet was going to be a big deal when he wrote his first web app in 1993, at the dawn of the graphical Internet. Liam has held various product management roles at organizations of all sizes. In his spare time, he exercises his hidden talent for racing fast cars.

Sessions:

  • NGINX Unit: Rebooting our Universal Web App Server: August 23, 9:20 AM PST

Liam Crilly

Senior Director, Product Management at NGINX

Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher

CEO at Fermyon

About Matt Butcher:

Matt is a founder and CEO of Fermyon. He is one of the original creators of Helm, Brigade, CNAB, OAM, Glide, and Krustlet. He has written or co-written many books, including Learning Helm and Go in Practice, and co-created the Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes series. These days, he works mostly on WebAssembly projects such as Spin, Fermyon, and Bartholomew. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and lives in Colorado.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat: The Importance of an Ecosystem: August 23, 8:40 AM PST
Matt Butcher

Matt Butcher

CEO at Fermyon

Melissa McKay

Melissa McKay

Developer Advocate at JFrog

About Melissa McKay:

Melissa's background and experience as a software engineer spans a slew of technologies and tools used in the development and operation of enterprise products and services. She is a mom, software engineer, Java geek, huge fan of unconferences, and is always on the lookout for ways to grow and learn. She has spoken at Code One and Java Dev Day Mexico and is part of the JCrete and JAlba unconference teams. She is currently a Developer Advocate for JFrog, Inc.

Sessions:

  • Software Delivery and the Rube Goldberg Machine: What Is the Problem We Are Trying to Solve?: August 24, 10:35 AM PST
Melissa McKay

Melissa McKay

Developer Advocate at JFrog

Melissa Sussman

Melissa Sussmann

Lead Technical Evangelist at Sumo Logic

About Melissa Sussmann:

Melissa is the Lead Technical Advocate at Sumo Logic, where she helps with developer advocacy. She has 10 years of domain expertise and experience as both a product marketing manager and product manager for developer tools. In her spare time, Melissa enjoys gardening, reading, playing with her dog, and working on side projects. Projects she enjoys include contributing to the Lightning Network, writing smart contracts, building custom hardware, and woodworking.

Sessions:

  • Sumologic <3 Open Source: August 24, 11:45 AM PST
Melissa Sussman

Melissa Sussmann

Lead Technical Evangelist at Sumo Logic

Mona Khabazan

Mona Khabazan

Director of Product Management at NGINX

About Mona Khabazan:

Based in Cambridge, MA, Mona is a strategic innovator with progressive experience in successfully directing new product initiatives and 1.0 product launches, and leading great teams to drive change and growth. Mona has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from University of Waterloo in Canada and a master's degree from Harvard University.

Sessions:

  • Inspiring the Journey: From Open Source to Scale Out to Self Service: August 23, 8:20 AM PST
Mona Khabazan

Mona Khabazan

Director of Product Management at NGINX

Nina Forsyth

Nina Forsyth

Director of Product Management at NGINX

About Nina Forsyth:

Nina is Director of Product Management in the NGINX product group at F5. She currently drives innovation for NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus, and NGINX Instance Manager. She also shapes the product roadmap and partners with development and UI teams to inject the user viewpoint into our latest technologies.

Sessions:

  • Inspiring the Journey: From Open Source to Scale Out to Self Service: August 23, 8:20 AM PST
Nina Forsyth

Nina Forsyth

Director of Product Management at NGINX

Oliver O'Mahony

Oliver O’Mahony

Sr Software Engineer at NGINX

About Oliver O’Mahony:

Oliver works as Technical Lead for open source NGINX Agent in the NGINX product group at F5. He enjoys working on modern applications, microservices and event driven architectures. He loves complex problem solving and working with large scale distributed systems. When he is not travelling he loves exploring new places in Ireland.

Sessions:

  • Open Sourcing NGINX Agent and Demo: August 23, 12:30 PM PST
Oliver O'Mahony

Oliver O’Mahony

Sr Software Engineer at NGINX

Rey Lejano

Rey Lejano

Kubernetes Field Engineer at Rancher

About Rey Lejano:

Rey Lejano is a Field Engineer at SUSE by way of Rancher Labs. Rey is a contributor and maintainer of the Kubernetes project as the Kubernetes v1.23 Release Lead, v1.25 Emeritus Adviser, Kubernetes Security Special Interest Group sub-project lead, and co-chair of the Kubernetes Documentation Special Interest Group who maintains kubernetes.io, reference documentation for the Kubernetes API, kubectl, and kubeadm.

Sessions:

  • A Guide to Adopting Kubernetes: August 24, 10:55 AM PST
Rey Lejano

Rey Lejano

Kubernetes Field Engineer at Rancher

Rob Whiteley

Vice President, General Manager at NGINX

About Rob Whiteley:

Rob is the Vice President, General Manager of the NGINX product group at F5, overseeing engineering, product management, and marketing. He also maintains dotted-line responsibility for NGINX sales, support, professional services, finance, HR, and legal resources within corporate F5. Rob joins F5 from Hedvig, where he built the marketing function and helped launch the company from stealth. Prior to that, Rob was at Riverbed, where he held various marketing and operations roles, including GM of Riverbed’s Storage Delivery Business Unit. Before Rob got started in marketing, he spent 10 years in various analyst and executive roles at Forrester Research where he was responsible for 400 members of the research staff when he left in 2012.

Sessions:

  • NGINX, Open Source, and You – Another Decade of Innovation: August 23, 8:05 AM PST
  • A Journey Through NGINX and Open Source with Kelsey Hightower: August 24, 9:10 AM PST

Rob Whiteley

Vice President, General Manager at NGINX

Robert Haynes

Robert Haynes

Senior Manager, Technical Marketing at NGINX

About Robert Haynes:

From helpdesk to sysadmin, then sales and marketing, Robert has always enjoyed exploring new technologies, then writing and talking about them. When he’s not working, you might find him riding bicycles, training his dog, or haplessly chasing his escapologist chickens around the yard.

Sessions:

  • NGINX 101: Get Up and Running with NGINX: August 25, 9:00 AM PST
Robert Haynes

Robert Haynes

Senior Manager, Technical Marketing at NGINX

Robert Sirchia

Robert Sirchia

Sr. Technical Evangelist at SUSE

About Robert Sirchia:

I am Robert Sirchia a Senior Technical Evangelist with SUSE. I have been working in technology for over 17 years. Most of that time has been spend in the .NET and Microsoft space. Moved towards the cloud when .NET became a first-class citizen on them. And I have never left, from Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. I have led several large modernization efforts. I built out my last companies cloud practice. Putting together service offerings, comprehensive training and marketing. I have worked across a few industries from real estate to financial institutions. I have also did work with both energy & chemical companies and politics.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat: The Importance of an Ecosystem: August 23, 8:40 AM PST
Robert Sirchia

Robert Sirchia

Sr. Technical Evangelist at SUSE

Rohit Joshi

Rohit Joshi

Sr. Director, Software Engineering (API Gateway and Tokenization) at Capital One

About Rohit Joshi:

Rohit is a technologist, inventor, and engineering leader at Capital One. He has built numerous highly performant, distributed platforms at Capital One including API Gateway, Tokenization, and Virtual Card (VCN). Some of these platforms were started as his hobby projects and now serve billions of transactions enabling API, Data, and Payment Security at Capital One. He also leads the Heart Centered Leadership program at Capital One to help associates build empathetic leadership skills, mitigate stress, and understand the benefits of meditation. Rohit holds a Master in Physics and lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat with Capital One: Building API Infrastructure at Scale: August 24, 8:20 AM PST
Rohit Joshi

Rohit Joshi

Sr. Director, Software Engineering (API Gateway and Tokenization) at Capital One

Stephen Chin

Stephen Chin

VP of Developer Relations at JFrog

About Stephen Chin:

Stephen is VP of Developer Relations at JFrog, chair of the CDF governing board, member of the CNCF governing board, and author of The Definitive Guide to Modern Client Development, Raspberry Pi with Java, Pro JavaFX Platform, and the upcoming DevOps Tools for Java Developers title from O’Reilly. He has keynoted numerous conferences around the world including swampUP, Devoxx, JNation, JavaOne, Joker, and Open Source India. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done evangelism tours in Europe, Japan, and Brazil, interviewing hackers in their natural habitat. When he is not traveling, he enjoys teaching kids how to do embedded and robot programming together with his teenage daughter.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat: The Importance of an Ecosystem: August 23, 8:40 AM PST
Stephen Chin

Stephen Chin

VP of Developer Relations at JFrog

Steve Flanders

Steve Flanders

Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk

About Steve Flanders:

Steve is a Director of Engineering at Splunk responsible for Observability “Getting Data In”, which includes contributions to the CNCF OpenTelemetry open source project. Previously, he was the Head of Product and Experience at Omnition, which was acquired by Splunk. Steve has an extensive background in software development, user experience, product design, and operational management. He has a strong focus on product usability, data-driven decision making, and agile development processes.

Sessions:

  • OpenTelemetry 101 FTW: August 23, 11:50 AM PST
Steve Flanders

Steve Flanders

Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk

Timo Stark

Product Management Engineer II at NGINX

About Timo Stark:

Timo has been a passionate web developer for more than 15 years, having started when he was just 12 years old. He started his professional career as a web developer and solutions architect in the automotive industry. He joined the NGINX product group at F5 as a Professional Services Engineer in February 2020 and focuses on helping customers integrate NGINX products into their solutions. Outside of work, he volunteers as a firefighter.

Sessions:

  • Unit Rebooted – Real World Use Cases and Success Stories: August 23, 11:10 AM PST
  • NGINX 101: Lightweight and Open Source Universal Web App Server: August 25, 10:30 AM PST

Timo Stark

Product Management Engineer II at NGINX

Vikash Tiwari

Vikash Tiwari

Distinguished Engineer at Capital One

About Vikash Tiwari:

Vikash is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One who is responsible for maintaining highly scalable systems such as an API Gateway. He is an AWS Certified Solutions architect with more than 14 years of experience as a Software Developer. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, hiking and spending time with family.

Sessions:

  • Fireside Chat with Capital One: Building API Infrastructure at Scale: August 24, 8:20 AM PST
Vikash Tiwari

Vikash Tiwari

Distinguished Engineer at Capital One

Ward Bekker

Ward Bekker

Sr. Principal Solutions Engineer at Grafana

About Ward Bekker:

Based in the Netherlands, Ward works as a Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs. As a big fan of the Grafana Loki project, he likes to publish Loki how-to videos on YouTube, share project news and tips on social media, and give Loki-flavored workshops. Earlier in his career, he specialized in big-data cybersecurity and as a developer of high-traffic websites.

Sessions:

  • NGINX Service Mesh Observability with the LGTM Stack from Grafana: August 24, 11:35 AM PST
Ward Bekker

Ward Bekker

Sr. Principal Solutions Engineer at Grafana