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
DevOps Author & Researcher
Portland, United States
Focus area:
#DevOps#Software delivery#Technology organizations#Engineering leadership
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…
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Charity Majors
Co-founder & CTO at Honeycomb
San Francisco, United States
Focus area:
#Observability#Production engineering#Distributed systems#Engineering leadership
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…
Nicole Forsgren
Senior Director, GM, Developer Experience at Google
United States
Focus area:
#Developer productivity#DevOps research#Developer experience#Software delivery
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…
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Jez Humble
DevOps & Continuous Delivery Author
California, United States
Focus area:
#Continuous delivery#DevOps#Lean software development#Software delivery performance
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…
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John Allspaw
Resilience Engineering Researcher
Brooklyn, United States
Focus area:
#Resilience engineering#Incident analysis#Human factors#Software operations
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+…
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Patrick Debois
DevOps Pioneer & Technologist
Ghent, Belgium
Focus area:
#DevOps#DevSecOps#AI engineering#Software delivery
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…
Kelsey Hightower
Cloud Native Engineer & Educator
Washougal, United States
Focus area:
#Kubernetes#Cloud infrastructure#Distributed systems#Developer education
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…
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Liz Fong-Jones
Technical Fellow at Honeycomb
Sydney, Australia
Focus area:
#Observability#Site reliability engineering#Distributed systems#Production engineering
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…
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Viktor Farcic
Developer Advocate at Upbound
Barcelona, Spain
Focus area:
#DevOps#Platform engineering#Kubernetes#GitOps#Developer self-service
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,…
Jyoti Bansal
Co-founder & CEO at Harness
San Francisco, United States
Focus area:
#Software delivery#CI/CD#Developer productivity#AI-assisted engineering
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…
Dave Farley
Founder & Managing Director at Continuous Delivery Ltd
United Kingdom
Focus area:
#Continuous delivery#Software engineering#Test automation#DevOps
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,…
Luca Galante
Managing Director & Senior Analyst at Weave Intelligence
Noto, Italy
Focus area:
#Platform engineering#Internal developer platforms#Developer experience#AI infrastructure
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…
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Kaspar von Grünberg
Founder & CEO at Weave Intelligence
Berlin, Germany
Focus area:
#Platform engineering#Internal developer platforms#Developer experience#AI platforms
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…
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Kohsuke Kawaguchi
Jenkins Creator & Software Builder
San Jose, United States
Focus area:
#Continuous integration#CI/CD#Developer tooling#Open source
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…
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Steve McGhee
Site Reliability Engineer at Google
San Luis Obispo, United States
Focus area:
#Site reliability engineering#Distributed systems#Production reliability#Incident management
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…
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Bryan Cantrill
Co-founder & CTO at Oxide Computer Company
San Francisco, United States
Focus area:
#Systems software#Cloud infrastructure#Operating systems#Engineering culture
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…
Werner Vogels
VP & CTO at Amazon
Seattle, United States
Focus area:
#Distributed systems#Cloud computing#Scalable architecture#Technology leadership
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…
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
London, United Kingdom
Focus area:
#Platform engineering#Developer experience#Site reliability#Internal developer platforms
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…
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Angie Jones
VP of Developer Experience at Agentic AI Foundation
New Orleans, United States
Focus area:
#Developer experience#AI engineering#Test automation#Open source
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…
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Casey Rosenthal
Chaos Engineering Author & Practitioner
Blue Hill, United States
Focus area:
#Chaos engineering#Reliability#Resilience engineering#Distributed systems
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…
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Mitchell Hashimoto
Co-founder at Superlogical
Manhattan Beach, United States
Focus area:
#Infrastructure automation#Developer tooling#Cloud infrastructure#Open source
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…
Connect with Mitchell:
Patrick Kua
Technology Leadership Educator
Germany
Focus area:
#Technical leadership#Engineering management#Systems thinking#Organizational design
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…
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Andrew Fong
VP of Engineering at Databricks
San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Focus area:
#Infrastructure#Software delivery#Site reliability#Developer experience
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…
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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.
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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