Invited Speakers

Sandra Bittner is a Senior Engineer and Cyber Security Specialist with Arizona Public Service at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. She provides cyber security leadership in the area of cyber security program development for the Strategic Teaming and Resources Sharing Alliance (STARS) and is an active member of the Nuclear Information Technology Strategic Leadership (NITSL) community.

Chet’s career in technology began at age 16 when he worked at a VAR building small business networks. Since then he has held a number of positions including Director of Enterprise Unix Systems at the University of Southern California, and Senior Systems Architect at Ticketmaster Entertainment.

Chet is a contributor to the OpenStack Nova project. His passion is working on availability and scalability problems in large-scale systems deployments.

Mark Cavage is a software engineer at Joyent, where he works primarily on distributed systems supporting Joyent's cloud computing suite, and maintains several popular open source projects, such as restify and ldapjs. Prior to joining Joyent, Mark was a senior software engineer with Amazon Web Services, where he was primarily responsible for envisioning and launching the AWS Identity and Access Management product.

Michele Chubirka, aka "Mrs. Y.," is a recovering UNIX engineer working in network security. She is also the host of the Healthy Paranoia podcast, the security feed of Packetpushers, and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences, and spending time in the Bat Cave. She sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, she can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.

Dave is a strategist and researcher in EMC's Office of the CTO where he focuses on the costs, scalability, and performance of data center infrastructure, especially in a Cloud setting. During his tenure at EMC, he has provided technical leadership in the areas of Network Virtualization, OpenStack, and converged infrastructure platforms such as OpenCompute. Prior to joining EMC, Dave spent ten years on Wall Street working on various facets of data center infrastructure for companies such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

Based on experience testing distributed storage systems in several public clouds, this talk will consist of two parts. The first part will cover approaches for characterizing and measuring storage workloads generally. The second part will cover the additional challenges posed by testing in public clouds. Contrary to popular belief, no two cloud servers are ever alike. Even the same server can exhibit wild and unpredictable performance swings over time, so new ways of analyzing performance are critical in these environments.

Jeff Darcy has worked on network and distributed storage systems for 20 years, including an instrumental role in developing MPFS (a precursor of modern pNFS) while at EMC. He is currently a member of the GlusterFS architecture team at Red Hat and frequently gives talks and tutorials about topics related to cloud storage.

Caskey Dickson is a Site Reliability Engineer/Software Engineer at Google, where he works writing and maintaining monitoring services that operate at "Google scale." In online service development since 1995, before coming to Google he was a senior developer at Symantec, wrote software for various internet startups such as CitySearch and CarsDirect, ran a consulting company, and even taught undergraduate and graduate computer science at Loyola Marymount University. He has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, a Masters in Systems Engineering, and an M.B.A from Loyola Marymount.

Richard Elling has been designing and building dependable, networked computer systems to solve complex problems for more than 25 years. He was an early adopter of ZFS and has developed benchmarks and analysis techniques for evaluation of data protection schemes and performability of systems. He wrote Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0 (Prentice Hall, 2002) and has authored many white papers, Sun BluePrints, and refereed papers on dependable systems and performability. He is a regular contributor to the ZFS community and is currently the Director of Solution Engineering for Nexenta Systems.

Rik Farrow began working with UNIX system security in 1984 and with TCP/IP networks in 1988. He taught his first security class in 1987 and started teaching internationally the following year. He has been a consultant since 1980 and has advised both firewall and intrusion detection companies in the design of their products. Rik has published two books, one on UNIX security and the other on system administration. He designed a five-day, hands-on class in Internet security for internal use by the Department of Defense. He wrote the "Network Defense" column for Network Magazine for over six years and is currently the editor of ;login:, the USENIX magazine. Rik lives with his wife in the high desert of northern Arizona, where he continues to work and do research, and he still ventures out to teach.

Æleen Frisch has been working as a system administrator for over 30 years. She currently looks after a pathologically heterogeneous network of UNIX and Windows systems. She is the author of several books, including Essential System Administration (now in its 3rd edition from O'Reilly). Æleen was the program committee chair for USENIX's 2003 Large Installation System Administration conference, and is a frequent presenter at both USENIX and LISA events, as well as presenting classes for universities and corporations worldwide.

Brendan Gregg is the lead performance engineer at Joyent, where he analyzes performance and scalability at any level of the software stack. He is the author of Systems Performance (Prentice Hall, 2013), and primary author of DTrace (Prentice Hall). He was previously a kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems where he developed the ZFS L2ARC, and has also developed numerous performance analysis tools. His recent work includes performance visualizations.

Nadav Har'El of Cloudius Systems Ltd. is one of the core developers of OSv. For the last 18 years, prior to joining Cloudius, Nadav worked as a researcher in several companies, where he pursued diverse research interests including high-performance computing, network and system software, natural language processing and information retrieval. He published 16 academic papers, and filed 19 patents, and also started or contributed to several open-source projects. In recent years, Nadav's main research focus is virtualization—specifically nested virtualization, high-performance I/O virtualization, and network virtualization.

Shumon Huque http://www.huque.com/~shuque/ is the Director of Engineering, Research, and Development for the University of Pennsylvania's Networking and Telecommunications division and also serves as the Lead Engineer for the MAGPI GigaPoP. He is involved in network engineering, systems engineering, and the design and operation of key infrastructure services at Penn (DNS, DHCP, authentication, email, Web, VoIP, Directory, etc). He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in computer science from Penn. In addition to his day job, Shumon teaches (part -time) a lab course on advanced network protocols at Penn's Engineering School.

Shumon is the principal IPv6 architect at Penn and has been running production IPv6 networks and services for almost a decade.

Ronald Johnson is a 20-year SysAdmin veteran with a passion for communication technologies and organizational structures. He is currently a Systems Manager at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Stuart Kendrick is an IT Architect at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, specializing in troubleshooting, device monitoring, and transport. He started his career in 1984, writing in FORTRAN on Crays for Science Applications International Corporation; he worked in help desk, desktop support, system administration, and network support for Cornell University in Ithaca and later Manhattan. He has been in his multi-disciplinary role at FHCRC in Seattle since 1993, where he functions as ITIL problem manager/problem analyst and leads root cause analysis efforts. He is happiest when correlating packet traces with syslog extracts and writing scripts to query device MIBs.

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His best-known books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He received the SAGE 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award. He works at Stack Exchange in NYC.

Jon Masters is the chief ARM Architect at Red Hat, where he works on the Fedora ARM project. Jon has been a Linux developer for more than 17 years, since beginning university at the age of 13. He is the author of a number of books on the Linux operating system, including “Building Embedded Linux Systems,” and the upcoming “Porting Linux.” An accomplished musician and hiker, he also enjoys unicycling among his many other hobbies.

Jan is a tech lead in the security operations team and has been designing and driving enterprise security initiatives within Google. His focus at the moment is machine identity and inventory. Prior to joining Google in 2010, he was senior security analyst at Compass Security AG, a leading Swiss security assessment company.

He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and a master’s degree with honors in security and forensic computing from the Dublin City University.

Steven is a sysadmin on the Site Reliability Engineering team for Stack Exchange (operators of great Q&A sites such as Server Fault and Stack Overflow) and a Microsoft MVP in PowerShell. Steven also leads two local user groups, the Greater Milwaukee IT Pro User Community and the Greater Milwaukee Script Club. He speaks regularly to local user groups and can be found at various conferences.

Steve Pinkham is a security researcher for Maven Security Consulting Inc. (www.mavensecurity.com). Steve has spent time in systems administration, programming, security research, and consulting. He dabbles in electronics and philosophy, and enjoys cheese and fine tea. If you're unlucky you might run into him wearing a backpack in some remote corner of the world. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Noa Resare is a senior engineer at Spotify, currently working with various cloud-related challenges. He is a committer with the Apache Cloudstack project. Noa’s background is in both operations and as a developer, and he has been giving technical presentations at DevOpsdays Göteborg, at Cassandra Europe in London and at Apache Cloudstack meetups in Ghent and in NYC.

Ben Rockwood is the Director of Cloud Operations for Joyent. With almost 20 years of UNIX systems administration experience, he has been an active blogger and writer for more than a decade. He strongly believes that "SA's help SA's." He lives in California, loves his wife and the challenges of systems administration, and is the father of five.

Theo Schlossnagle is an expert in scalable systems design and telemetry collection and analysis. He has an academic background in distributed systems and founded several companies that build highly scalable Internet-facing software.

Jeanne has a background in system administration, working with FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. She has worked at a number of companies in the Internet industry, including a regional ISP, a video hosting company, and, for the past six years, Afilias, a Registry and DNS service provider. In her current role of Service Delivery Manager at Afilias, she is owner and manager for key ITIL processes including continual service improvement, release and deployment management, change management, problem management, and incident management. She also manages projects geared toward site reliability and disaster recovery. Jeanne got her BA from Vassar College and did graduate work at the University of Toronto in Medieval European studies, teaching Latin in her pre-IT years.

John Sellens has been involved in system and network administration since 1986 and is the author of several related USENIX papers, a number of ;login: articles, and the USENIX Short Topics book #7, System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability. He holds an M.Math. in computer science from the University of Waterloo and is a Chartered Accountant. He is the proprietor of SYONEX, a systems and networks consultancy, and is currently a member of the systems team at Magna International. From 1999 to 2004, he was the General Manager for Certainty Solutions in Toronto. Prior to joining Certainty, John was the Director of Network Engineering at UUNET Canada and was a staff member in computing and information technology at the University of Waterloo for 11 years.

Rob leads standardization and controller software architecture at Big Switch, where he developed and evangelized the emerging OpenFlow standard and network virtualization. He is the current Chair of the ONF’s Architecture & Framework Working Group and all Northbound API activity and was vice-chair for the ONF Testing & Interoperability Working Group. Rob prototyped the first OpenFlow-based network hypervisor, the “FlowVisor,” allowing production and experimental traffic to safely co-exist on the same physical network, and is involved in various standards efforts and partner and customer engagements. Rob holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

James Sweeny is a Professional Services Engineer for Puppet Labs. He spends most of his time flying around the world helping companies solve their systems management problems, and ranting on endless tangents about the wonders of Puppet and open source software and he one day hopes to stop receiving phantom Nagios alerts from his past life as a sysadmin. Though he calls New York City home, he is rarely there, but is happy anywhere with good food and good beer.

David Thaw is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut and an Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is a law and technology expert whose research and scholarship examine the regulation of the Internet and computing technologies, with specific focus on cybersecurity regulation and cybercrime. Dr. Thaw received his Ph.D., J.D., and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.S. and B.A from the University of Maryland.

Prior to joining the Law School faculty, Professor Thaw was a Research Associate on the University of Maryland Computer Science faculty, where he conducted research with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center and taught an undergraduate honors seminar on cybersecurity, law, and policy.

Professor Thaw is a frequent presenter on cybersecurity regulation and cybercrime. He has also testified before the U.S. House of Representatives regarding his research on cybersecurity regulation and its implications for federal legislation.

Guido Trotter a Senior Systems Engineer at Google, has worked as a core Ganeti developer and designer since 2007. He is also a regular conference speaker, having presented at LISA, Fosdem, Linuxcon, Debconf, and other open source and community gatherings. He mostly speaks about Ganeti, virtualization in the open source world, and Linux networking features for virtualized environments.

Ariel Tseitlin manages the Netflix Cloud and is interested in all things cloudy. At Netflix, he is Director of Cloud Solutions, helping Netflix be successful in the cloud, including cloud tooling, monitoring, performance and scalability, and cloud operations and reliability engineering. Ariel's team builds Asgard and the Simian Army, including the Chaos Monkey. Prior to Netflix, Ariel was VP of Technology and Products at Sungevity and before that was the Founder and CEO of CTOWorks.

Helga has been a Google Software Engineer since 2011 and a member of the Ganeti core team since 2012. Inside Ganeti she implemented better network support, enhancements of storage handling, and various bug fixes. In her life before Google she worked at a biotech company, bringing medical analysis robots to life. She is a member of the German Chaos Computer Club and has given talks at their conferences, including one at 28c3 about hearing aid technology and one at the OpenChaos Cologne about C#/.Net. At university her focus was on data-mining and pattern recognition; she participated successfully in various data-mining competitions.

Mandi Walls is a technical consultant for Seattle-based Opscode, the makers of Chef. Prior to joining Opscode, Mandi served as a system administrator at Admeld, NHGRI, and AOL, where she ran sites including moviefone.com, games.com, andwww.aol.com. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and an M.B.A. from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, through the global OneMBA program. She is a published author with O'Reilly and speaks at numerous conferences and events.

Brian Wellman is the Director of Systems Operations at Metacloud. He is responsible for the implementation, operation, support, and monitoring of Metacloud’s client deployments as well as Metacloud’s internal infrastructure. He has 16 years of experience in designing, implementing, and operating highly available, large scale server deployments and private clouds.

Prior to joining the Metacloud team in 2012, Brian held the role of Director of Web Systems at Ticketmaster Entertainment. His team managed an infrastructure that consisted of thousands of nodes spread across several datacenters worldwide and was responsible for the implementation and operation of Ticketmaster's first private cloud.

John Wilkes has been at Google since 2008, where he is working on cluster management and infrastructure services. He is interested in far too many aspects of distributed systems, but a recurring theme has been technologies that allow systems to manage themselves. In his spare time he continues, stubbornly, trying to learn how to blow glass. http://e-wilkes.com/john

Allen Wittenauer has been involved with Apache Hadoop since May 2007, when he was hired by Yahoo! to bring large-scale operational experience to the fledgling project. His work there helped create the basic blueprints that almost all Hadoop deployments follow today. At LinkedIn, his experience provided key insight and a foundation to its award-winning data science team.

Diego Zamboni is a computer scientist, consultant, author, programmer, sysadmin, and overall geek who works as a senior security advisor at CFEngine. He has more than 20 years of experience in system administration and security, and has worked in both the applied and theoretical sides of the computer science field. Zamboni is the author of the book Learning CFEngine 3, published by O’Reilly Media.