Christian Ashby has a broad range of experience working with the architecture of Cloud environments - with every definition from "someone else’s data center" to serverless / no-ops public cloud and PaaS environments. With a background in large IT outsourcing designing scale-up compute and storage solutions, Christian has been focusing more and more on Cloud architectures and assisting his customers find their route to the Cloud and modern IT practices. OpenStack has always been one of the components of this customer journey, and Christian is pleased to see it move deeper into the Enterprise space with later releases, and hopes that this trend continues.
Stefano Canepa is an information and communication technology professional with more then 20 years of various experiences. Stefano’s main interest now is cloud computing with a special focus on OpenStack, its management, and centralized logging solutions. He started working as system administrator in one of the first internet service providers established in Italy. At that time, it was natural to install applications you needed from source code, so he learnt programming on Unix. He started looking after Windows systems and, at his new company, Stefano was involved in the deployment and administration of a huge network of Windows NT computers spread all over Italy. He continued his career moving to network design and testing. He then turned into a full time software developer, and for a while Stefano wrote applications to control medical devices. He moved to a new company and switched to write railways’ centralized traffic control GUI applications. After that experience, Stefano was hired as the system software engineer to manage clouds in a team of professionals coming from all over the world.
Ricky Donato is an NFV/SDN solutions architect, with a passion for open source and an unhealthy love for Costa coffee. In his 23 years in the industry, his technical experience has covered networking design, development, network security, and OpenStack.
Geoff Higginbottom is an OpenStack specialist architect at Rackspace, where he is responsible for designing OpenStack Clouds for customers. Prior to Rackspace, Geoff was the technical cofounder, CTO, and cloud architect at a boutique cloud consultancy, where he designed numerous public and private cloud deployments. Geoff’s technical career started with real-time computer systems while serving in the Royal Navy as a computer engineer in the 90s, and it has now spanned to almost every facet of IT. Geoff is a keen sailor, scuba diver, motorcyclist, and amateur photographer, and his ambition is to one day sail around the world!
Andrew McCrae works as a software developer at Rackspace, in the Rackspace Private Cloud team, working specifically on Ceph storage solutions. He was the project technical lead for the OpenStack-Ansible project for the Ocata and Pike cycles. Andy began his career in 2007 at Rackspace, as a Linux systems administrator, after completing a masters in Engineering, majoring Computer Science at University College London (UCL). Andy specializes in distributed storage, specifically Swift (OpenStack Object Storage), and Ceph, as well as in deployment automation using tools such as Ansible and Chef. He was previously a core reviewer on the Chef-OpenStack project. Andy was also a reviewer on the third edition of OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook, Packt Publishing.
Wojciech Sciesinski is an IT professional with 15 years of experience in a broad range of technologies, namely Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Exchange Server, PowerShell, Linux, automation, virtualization, and cloud-related tools, and roles, particularly, a support engineer, architect, and developer. Wojciech is curious about new things, especially when they are open source and complicated enough to not be boring.