Top 23 DevOps Influencers to Follow in 2026
The best DevOps influencers cut through the noise with real-world insights you can actually use. Following the right voices means faster access to emerging practices, hard-won lessons, and honest takes on tooling and culture. I've pulled together the top DevOps influencers worth your time—so you can spend less time searching and more time building.
Top 23 DevOps Influencers
Below are the profiles of the top DevOps influencers, covering who they are and the impact they've made in this space.
Gene Kim
Gene Kim is the founder of IT Revolution, a former Tripwire CTO, and an author and researcher whose books include The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, Accelerate, and The…
Gene Kim is the founder of IT Revolution, a former Tripwire CTO, and an author and researcher whose books include The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, Accelerate, and The Unicorn Project.
Kim studies how successful technology teams work faster and more reliably, and how they design their systems and teams. Through his books and industry summits, he helps leaders apply DevOps practices across large organizations.
Charity Majors
Charity Majors is a co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability company, and a longtime operations engineer. Her earlier infrastructure work includes Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab.
Majors helped make observability a…
Charity Majors is a co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability company, and a longtime operations engineer. Her earlier infrastructure work includes Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab.
Majors helped make observability a practical way to understand what is happening in software systems. She co-authored Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering and writes about running software, engineering culture, and complex systems.
Nicole Forsgren
Nicole Forsgren is Senior Director and GM of Developer Experience at Google, a researcher and co-author of Accelerate. She founded DevOps Research and Assessment, the organization known as DORA.
Forsgren uses research to…
Nicole Forsgren is Senior Director and GM of Developer Experience at Google, a researcher and co-author of Accelerate. She founded DevOps Research and Assessment, the organization known as DORA.
Forsgren uses research to study how software teams deliver work, how productive developers are, and what helps organizations perform well. Her work on DORA and the SPACE framework helps technology leaders understand how engineering practices and working conditions affect results.
Jez Humble
Jez Humble is a Google Cloud technology advocate, UC Berkeley lecturer, and co-author of Continuous Delivery, Accelerate, Lean Enterprise, and The DevOps Handbook on modern software delivery.
Humble shows…
Jez Humble is a Google Cloud technology advocate, UC Berkeley lecturer, and co-author of Continuous Delivery, Accelerate, Lean Enterprise, and The DevOps Handbook on modern software delivery.
Humble shows how continuous delivery connects with product development, automation, feedback, and team performance.
His writing and DORA research have given engineering leaders practical frameworks for making software releases safer, faster, and more sustainable.
John Allspaw
John Allspaw is a software operations and resilience researcher, co-founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs, former Etsy CTO, and co-editor of the O’Reilly book Web Operations on running web systems.
His 2009 “10+…
John Allspaw is a software operations and resilience researcher, co-founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs, former Etsy CTO, and co-editor of the O’Reilly book Web Operations on running web systems.
His 2009 “10+ Deploys Per Day” talk with Paul Hammond became part of DevOps history. His later work focuses on resilience and incident analysis. He encourages teams to study how engineers keep complex systems running, even when things go wrong.
Patrick Debois
Patrick Debois is a technologist, consultant, and community builder who organized the first DevOpsDays in 2009. He helped popularize DevOps, and co-authored The DevOps Handbook on modern IT work.
Debois helped name…
Patrick Debois is a technologist, consultant, and community builder who organized the first DevOpsDays in 2009. He helped popularize DevOps, and co-authored The DevOps Handbook on modern IT work.
Debois helped name DevOps and bring its early community together. He continues to work across software development, security, operations, engineering leadership, and AI tools, helping teams collaborate across these fields.
Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower is a retired Google Distinguished Engineer, open-source educator, and infrastructure practitioner known for making Kubernetes, cloud systems, and distributed computing understandable.
Hightower’s Kubernetes the Hard Way helps people learn how…
Kelsey Hightower is a retired Google Distinguished Engineer, open-source educator, and infrastructure practitioner known for making Kubernetes, cloud systems, and distributed computing understandable.
Hightower’s Kubernetes the Hard Way helps people learn how Kubernetes works by setting it up themselves. His talks and open-source work emphasize understanding systems from first principles, giving DevOps and cloud practitioners a clearer view of the infrastructure they operate.
Liz Fong-Jones
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb and a developer advocate and site reliability engineer with two decades of experience, including years working on production systems at Google.
Fong-Jones draws on…
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb and a developer advocate and site reliability engineer with two decades of experience, including years working on production systems at Google.
Fong-Jones draws on her SRE experience to help teams monitor, troubleshoot, and improve complex systems. As a co-author of Observability Engineering, she shows engineers how to use data from live systems to understand failures, improve reliability, and make changes safely.
Viktor Farcic
Viktor Farcic is a developer advocate at Upbound, author, and host of DevOps Toolkit, where he covers cloud native infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitOps, platform engineering, and self-service.
Through tutorials, books, talks,…
Viktor Farcic is a developer advocate at Upbound, author, and host of DevOps Toolkit, where he covers cloud native infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitOps, platform engineering, and self-service.
Through tutorials, books, talks, and videos, Farcic explores how teams can move beyond tool-centric DevOps toward developer self-service and platform capabilities. His work explores how Kubernetes and infrastructure tools affect developers and the way teams build and deliver software.
Jyoti Bansal
Jyoti Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Harness, a software delivery company, and a technology entrepreneur who previously founded and led the application performance monitoring company AppDynamics.
At Harness, Bansal has focused…
Jyoti Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Harness, a software delivery company, and a technology entrepreneur who previously founded and led the application performance monitoring company AppDynamics.
At Harness, Bansal has focused on making it easier to move code into production while keeping the process secure and controlled. He also studies how AI-generated code affects software delivery: when teams write code faster, they need stronger reviews, testing, security checks, and deployment processes.
Dave Farley
Dave Farley founded Continuous Delivery Ltd and is a software engineer, consultant, and co-author of Continuous Delivery. He spent decades advancing modern delivery and engineering practices.
Farley advocates small changes, fast feedback, automated…
Dave Farley founded Continuous Delivery Ltd and is a software engineer, consultant, and co-author of Continuous Delivery. He spent decades advancing modern delivery and engineering practices.
Farley advocates small changes, fast feedback, automated testing, and keeping software continuously releasable. Through his books, training, consulting, and Modern Software Engineering channel, he teaches DevOps and continuous delivery as ways to test ideas, learn from results, and improve software through reliable feedback.
Luca Galante
Luca Galante is Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Weave Intelligence. He is a platform engineering analyst, community leader, and co-author of Thinking in Platforms with Kaspar von Grünberg.
Galante researches how…
Luca Galante is Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Weave Intelligence. He is a platform engineering analyst, community leader, and co-author of Thinking in Platforms with Kaspar von Grünberg.
Galante researches how enterprises build and operate internal platforms, with work spanning platform strategy, observability, security, FinOps, and AI infrastructure. Through Weave Intelligence, PlatformCon, and Platform Weekly, he turns practitioner patterns into guidance for engineering and technology leaders.
Kaspar von Grünberg
Kaspar von Grünberg is a founder and CEO at Weave Intelligence and practitioner who helped build the Platform Engineering community and co-authored Thinking in Platforms with analyst Luca Galante.
Von Grünberg has…
Kaspar von Grünberg is a founder and CEO at Weave Intelligence and practitioner who helped build the Platform Engineering community and co-authored Thinking in Platforms with analyst Luca Galante.
Von Grünberg has spent years developing internal developer platform concepts, reference architectures, and products. His work treats platforms as products for developers and increasingly examines how the same foundations—identity, policy, infrastructure, and self-service—can support AI agents and agentic software development.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins and a software and company builder. His work on continuous integration helped make automated build and delivery workflows widely accessible.
Kawaguchi created Jenkins, which became…
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins and a software and company builder. His work on continuous integration helped make automated build and delivery workflows widely accessible.
Kawaguchi created Jenkins, which became a widely used tool for automating software builds, tests, and releases. His work helped make these automated steps a standard part of DevOps.
Steve McGhee
Steve McGhee is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google with a background on distributed systems, production reliability, networking, security, and operating large-scale infrastructure.
McGhee focuses on helping teams make software more reliable…
Steve McGhee is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google with a background on distributed systems, production reliability, networking, security, and operating large-scale infrastructure.
McGhee focuses on helping teams make software more reliable before problems happen. Through his writing, talks, and training, he explains how to build reliability programs, understand complex systems, and improve the way teams run their services.
Bryan Cantrill
Bryan Cantrill is co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, a systems software engineer and longtime infrastructure builder. His earlier work includes Sun Microsystems and Joyent Systems.
At Oxide, Cantrill helps design…
Bryan Cantrill is co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, a systems software engineer and longtime infrastructure builder. His earlier work includes Sun Microsystems and Joyent Systems.
At Oxide, Cantrill helps design computing systems that combine hardware, software, networking, and cloud tools for organizations to run on site. He also writes and speaks about debugging, engineering culture, open systems, and the decisions that make infrastructure reliable.
Werner Vogels
Werner Vogels is VP and CTO of Amazon, where he drives the company’s technology vision. He’s a former Cornell distributed-systems researcher with a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Vogels has helped explain…
Werner Vogels is VP and CTO of Amazon, where he drives the company’s technology vision. He’s a former Cornell distributed-systems researcher with a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Vogels has helped explain how Amazon builds cloud systems that can serve many users reliably. He writes about system design and technology strategy, helping engineering leaders understand what changes when software operates around the world at a large scale.
Abby Bangser
Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso who works on Kratix and internal developer platforms, drawing on experience across platform, site reliability, quality engineering, and delivery.
Bangser treats internal platforms as…
Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso who works on Kratix and internal developer platforms, drawing on experience across platform, site reliability, quality engineering, and delivery.
Bangser treats internal platforms as products that help developers do their work. Through her work on Kratix, platform APIs, Team Topologies, and reliability, she shows how teams can build self-service tools that make development easier while meeting technical and organizational needs.
Angie Jones
Angie Jones is VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, an engineering executive and educator whose work include AI engineering, developer tooling, testing, and automation.
Jones helps developers use AI…
Angie Jones is VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, an engineering executive and educator whose work include AI engineering, developer tooling, testing, and automation.
Jones helps developers use AI agents through shared standards, working examples, and tools that work together. Her experience in test automation, developer education, and engineering leadership helps her build tools teams can use safely and effectively.
Casey Rosenthal
Casey Rosenthal is a software reliability leader and author known for defining Chaos Engineering, after leading Netflix’s Chaos Engineering team and co-founding verification company Verica.
Rosenthal helped develop chaos engineering, which tests…
Casey Rosenthal is a software reliability leader and author known for defining Chaos Engineering, after leading Netflix’s Chaos Engineering team and co-founding verification company Verica.
Rosenthal helped develop chaos engineering, which tests live systems to find weaknesses before they cause failures. His work helps teams learn how complex software behaves and make it more reliable.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Mitchell Hashimoto is co-founder of Superlogical and the co-founder of HashiCorp, where he helped create infrastructure tools including Vagrant and Terraform before stepping away in 2023.
Hashimoto’s tools help developers set up…
Mitchell Hashimoto is co-founder of Superlogical and the co-founder of HashiCorp, where he helped create infrastructure tools including Vagrant and Terraform before stepping away in 2023.
Hashimoto’s tools help developers set up consistent work environments and manage infrastructure with code. More recently, he has built developer tools such as Ghostty and worked with Superlogical on new ways to organize technical work.
Patrick Kua
Patrick Kua is the founder of Tech Lead Academy, a technology leadership educator and former N26 CTO and Chief Scientist. His career also includes technical leadership at ThoughtWorks.
Kua helps engineers become…
Patrick Kua is the founder of Tech Lead Academy, a technology leadership educator and former N26 CTO and Chief Scientist. His career also includes technical leadership at ThoughtWorks.
Kua helps engineers become stronger leaders. He teaches communication, big-picture thinking, team design, feedback, and how to guide change. His work shows how good leadership and teamwork help organizations make lasting improvements to their engineering practices.
Andrew Fong
Andrew Fong is Vice President of Engineering at Databricks and the former co-founder and CEO of Prodvana. His career focuses on infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and delivery.
Fong built Prodvana around automating…
Andrew Fong is Vice President of Engineering at Databricks and the former co-founder and CEO of Prodvana. His career focuses on infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and delivery.
Fong built Prodvana around automating cloud-native delivery and reducing production complexity before the company joined Databricks. His work spans CI/CD, deployment safety, infrastructure, SRE, and developer experience, with a continuing focus on making production systems easier for engineers and automation to operate.
Selection Methodology
I selected the leaders on this list based on their relevance, demonstrated expertise and impact, professional credibility, and ongoing contributions to the field.
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I look for evidence such as leading meaningful initiatives or delivering notable results within their organizations, developing influential ideas or practices, publishing research or educational resources, speaking or teaching, and other contributions that demonstrate impact within their work or the broader field.
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