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.

Wait, people run Kubernetes on mainframes? Yes, they do! Check out Elizabeth's 2019 KubeCon talk on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgyb_9zCaeA

Elizabeth K. Joseph

After spending a decade doing Linux systems administration, today Elizabeth K. Joseph works as a developer advocate at IBM focused on IBM Z.

As a systems administrator, she worked for a small services provider in Philadelphia before joining HPE where she worked for four years on the geographically distributed OpenStack Infrastructure team. This team runs the fully open source infrastructure for OpenStack development and lead to an interest in other open source projects that have opened up their infrastructures. While working on OpenStack she wrote the book Common OpenStack Deployments.

She is a former member of the Ubuntu Community Council and the co-author of the 8th and 9th editions of The Official Ubuntu Book. At home, she serves on Board of Directors for Partimus.org, a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area providing Linux-based computers to schools and education-focused community centers in need.

Holger Wolf

Holger started his career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard (HP) and then spent nearly 3 decades (!) working for IBM. Currently, he's e2e responsible for OpenShift on the IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms. Working closely with RedHat on getting OpenShift versions out and on new enhancements and functions.

Prior to that, Holger was responsible for System Tests of Linux Distributions on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE Platforms. Worked with Partners SUSE and RedHat to get their Enterprise Distributions on the IBM Platform. Led the test teams in Russia and the USA, with technical ownership of the test setup as well as driving test automation.

He started to take ownership of OpenShift on IBM zSystems (now IBM Z) and LinuxONE. Setting up the effort for getting OpenShift on the Platform and interlocking with RedHat.

Chris is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Instana, leading the technical strategy and development of Observability and IT Automation solutions at IBM. He is a recognized technology leader across programming languages, runtimes, platforms, observability, and automated IT operations. He has pioneered projects that fundamentally enhanced open-source communities and cloud-native platforms. He is currently focused on providing comprehensive real-time observability across the entire enterprise from Business to IT, and leveraging AI and Automation capabilities to enable organizations and teams to meet their operational objectives.

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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!

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Special KubeCon EU 2024 Episode! ----

Liz Rice is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security, and observability project (recently acquired by Cisco). She was Chair of CNCF's Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Cochair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O'Reilly. She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, competing in virtual races on Zwift, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.