End User Technical Advisory Board

Alolita is an OpenTelemetry GC member, CNCF Observability TAG co-chair and CNCF Governing Board alternate board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability practice and contributes to open source and open standards in OpenTelemetry, Unicode, W3C and the Observability TAG.

As a founding member of the CNCF’s End User TAB, Alolita has facilitated participation and contributions by CNCF end user members. She has also promoted end user priorities to the CNCF TOC and Governing Board. Within her rich track record, Alolita has demonstrated a deep commitment to CNCF’s goals and initiatives. Alolita brings a wealth of experience from her board leadership roles in the industry. For example, she has served on the boards of the OSI, SFLC.in and Unicode Consortium. Alolita has also provided strong leadership for observability and search engineering at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

Amr leads Cloud Platforms at Fidelity Investments. Over the past five years, he has led Fidelity’s strategy toward open source and CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, and OTEL to migrate the majority of the applications workload to the cloud. This strategy led to successful migration to build the industry’s largest Financial service, Kubernetes and Envoy farm.

Aparna is a technologist and cloud-native enthusiast. She started her career as a Software Engineer and has spent most part of her 18 years of experience specializing in Infrastructure and Data Platforms. She serves as co-chair of the “CNCF End User Developer Experience” SIG. She is passionate about building inclusive communities where everyone knows their voices will be heard. She is currently Director of Production Engineering at Shopify where she leads Shopify’s Cloud Native Production Platform. Previously, she was Director of Engineering at VMware where she was a founding member of Tanzu on vSphere, a Kubernetes Platform for the hybrid cloud. When not working, Aparna enjoys baking, gardening, and yoga.

Chad is the Chief Engineer for the Boeing Software Factory and a Technical Fellow. In these roles he drives the technical vision for how software is developed by thousands of engineers utilizing cloud native methodologies in a variety of highly regulated environments. As a DevOps enthusiast, he promotes the sharing of best practices around CI/CD.

When not working, Chad is an avid mountain biker.

Dave is an engineer in Spotify’s Platform team, where his focus has been core infrastructure, the data platform, and Spotify’s use of cloud services. A noted evangelist for cloud native and open source technologies, Dave spurred Spotify to join the CNCF and remain active in the community, launched the Stockholm CNCF meetup, and is both a CNCF Ambassador and a member of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Program Committee.

In his work at Spotify, Dave has been essential to the adoption of CNCF projects like Kubernetes, gRPC, Envoy, and OpenTelemetry, as well as experimentation with Service Mesh. Prior to his time with Spotify, Dave worked at AWS, at VMware on cloud management software, and at Microsoft on the Office team.

Garry is a lead engineer at JPMorgan Chase, currently focusing on observability. He has over a decade of Python experience, and enjoys trying out other languages, learning fun things about statistics, and making bread in his spare time.

Henrik leads a Product Management team responsible for the Intuit core platform, where he defines the strategy and direction that has shaped Intuit’s cloud native platform based on CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, Prometheus, Argo (and many more!) that’s used by 7000 developers and serving over 100M users.

Being a passionate member of the open source community for almost 30 years, from Linux through OpenStack and Kubernetes, Henrik is currently focused on the Argo project as a core maintainer. He also represents Intuit across other committees, like the CNOE project and the broader Linux Foundation, where he shares experiences and best practices from Intuit’s use of open source, making sure end users are heard and their pain points understood.

He loves engaging with the community and has been a prolific speaker and event program committee member across ArgoCon, GitOpsCon, Kubecon over the years. A native of Sweden, earning his B.Sc in information systems from the University of Gothenburg, he now resides in California with his family.

Joseph is the Principal Product Manager at Adobe, leading the Ethos platform team focused on developer experience with cloud-native infrastructure, traffic engineering, and API gateways. His expertise has directly supported thousands of developers in creating scalable and resilient applications. With over a decade of deep involvement in the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystems, Joseph currently serves as a Release Manager Associate within SIG-Release and has been a part of six Kubernetes release teams. Beyond his technical contributions, Joseph is dedicated to fostering diversity in tech. He actively mentors individuals from underrepresented groups, guiding them toward successful careers in open-source and technology sectors.

Katie is a cloud native leader, practitioner, and contributor, currently in a Senior Kubernetes Field Engineer role at Apple and a TOC for CNCF. As a cloud platform engineer, Katie has built the infrastructure for Conde Nast and American Express, gravitating towards cloud-native technologies, principles, and Kubernetes as the focal point. At CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), she was a Technical Oversight Committee member and led the CNCF End User Community. At present, Katie advises the Keptn startup and holds the Chief of Future Founders Officer (CFFO) position at OpenUK.

Recently, Katie released the Cloud Native Fundamentals course and led the creation of the CNCF KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) certification. Additionally, Katie is an active keynote public speaker, a #TechWomen100 winner, and a strong advocate for women in STEM.

Mario is a Software Engineer at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation. In 2015 he jumped into the very young Kubernetes ecosystem and helped application teams to learn all the stuff around containers and K8s.

When Mercedes Benz decided in 2016 to launch a managed Kubernetes service, Mario was one of the initial members in that team in the very early beginning. That managed service evolved to a worldwide distributed platform within MB with nearly 1,000 dedicated clusters.

Over time, he has witnessed the evolution of Kubernetes and the CNCF as well as the adoption of cloud native patterns in software teams all over the world. He always wore different hats to make the product and the team a success. But at heart, he is still an engineer who loves to code.

Tech Fellow, Senior Principal Engineer, and technology leader responsible for cloud-native technical and solutions architecture. Designs, develops, and maintains the enterprise Kubernetes-based cloud-native platform at BlackRock. Runs the BlackRock Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

Ricardo leads the Platform Infrastructure team at CERN with a strong focus on cloud native deployments and machine learning. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a lead of the CNCF Research User Group. Prior to this work Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Ever since I embarked on my software engineering journey over 20 years ago, my love for technology and innovation has shaped my life in remarkable ways. As a thoughtful leader and entrepreneur, I’ve been fortunate to work with incredible teams and witness the transformative power of digital solutions.

One of the most memorable chapters in my career has been helping organisations adopt DevOps and Cloud Native technologies. The excitement of seeing these changes drive agility and growth in a fast-paced industry has been truly rewarding.

A defining moment in my journey was when I co-founded Open IoT Vienna. This platform, which fosters collaboration and promotes Open Source solutions in the IoT space, has brought together countless talented individuals, creating a vibrant community I am immensely proud of.

Being an entrepreneur has taught me invaluable lessons, and I’ve had the privilege of launching multiple businesses. With each new venture, I’ve gained unique perspectives and learned to embrace challenges with resilience.

My passion for sharing knowledge and inspiring others has also led me to the stage as a keynote speaker. I’ve had the honour of discussing digital transformation and sovereignty, leadership, and emerging technologies. I find great joy in empowering others to succeed in the ever-evolving world of technology.

As I reflect on my journey, I am grateful for the experiences and connections that have shaped my life, and I am excited to continue empowering individuals and teams in the pursuit of innovation and success.