Follow the DevOps Thought Leaders – Part 2

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS AN ARCHIVED POST - Netuitive has since become Metricly, and the tool has matured greatly since the time this was written!

As an analytics pioneer, it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the DevOps movement. At the same time, we continue to see the next generation of IT following the best practices of the past when it comes to monitoring. Many DevOps shops seem content with eyeball-driven dashboard monitoring. Some like Etsy have initiated open source projects to develop and promote more advanced monitoring analytics with Skyline, but it remains a blind spot for most of the industry – especially in larger, more dynamic environments.

So as we refine our new SaaS-based product we have become very interested in DevOps industry expert opinions and perspective – particularly as it relates to the role of analytics.

Along the way we have been meeting and learning who the DevOps industry leaders are and thought it might be interesting to share the info with others. Last summer we posted a blog called Follow the Thought Leaders #DevOps. It was intended to be a resource DevOps interests and the list was sourced primarily based on their social media following. It featured leaders such as Gene Kim, John Willis, Andrew Clay Shaffer, Jesse Robbins, Patrick DeBois, Jez Humble, John Allspaw, Damon Edwards, and others.

After getting feedback, opinions and suggestions, we decided to extend the original blog. Below is a second installment with a list of additional thought leaders active on social media that we thought you may be interested to follow. While it includes Twitter handles, this list is based on suggestions from some of the thought leaders who were on the list of our original blog.

Check it out and, as always, your opinions (and suggestions for a third installment) are welcome.

Mark Burgess – @markburgess_osl– A well-known theoretician in the area of information systems, Burgess’ work has focused largely on distributed information infrastructure. He is particularly well-known for his work on Configuration Management and Promise Theory. He is the principal Founder of CFEngine, an emeritus professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, and author of numerous books, articles and papers on topics ranging from physics, Network and System Administration, to fiction.

Luke Kanies – @puppetmasterd – Founder and CEO of PuppetLabs, Kanies describes himself as a Unix system administrator and developer turned entrepreneur. He says he has focused his administration career on server automation, and working as a consultant with the current generation of tools convincing him that things could be better.

Eric Ries – @ericries – Creator of the Lean Startup methodology and author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. Ries previously co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU. BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms, and is an in Residence at Harvard.

Kevin Behr – @kevinbehr – Kevin Behr is the founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the chief strategist for CIO and Board Advisory Practice at Assemblage Pointe. He is the author of six IT management books, including the best-selling The Visible Ops Handbook, which he co-authored with Gene Kim and George Spafford, and the Definitive Guide to IT Management, published by Hewlett Packard.

Adrian Cockcroft – @adrianco – Before joining Battery Ventures, Adrian Cockcroft lead Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public-cloud architecture and the open sourcing of the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform, and also managed a team working on personalization algorithms and service-oriented refactoring. Adrian was a founding member of eBay Research Labs, developing advanced mobile applications and even building his own homebrew phone, years before iPhone and Android launched. As a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems he wrote the best-selling “Sun Performance and Tuning” book and was chief architect for High Performance Technical Computing.

Mike Orzen – @MikeOrzen – Mike’s passion for continual improvement and effective Enterprise Excellence methodologies helps clients build and drive a culture of operational excellence. With a consulting and coaching career spanning more than 20 years, Mike has collected a unique blend of Lean, Six Sigma, Finance, IT, and Operations insights that he uses to help organizations in their pursuit of Enterprise Excellence.

Patrick Lightbody – @plightbo – Before joining New Relic as VP of Product Management, Patrick founded two companies in the website testing space. HostedQA was acquired by Gomez and BrowserMob was acquired by Neustar. In addition to his entrepreneurial tendencies, he is a frequent contributor to open source software, particularly in the areas of Java web development and open source QA automation technologies. He has authored two books on open source technology and is the creator of several popular open source projects.