20 DevOps guys you should follow

DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between agile software development and operations. The DevOps tribe is a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues, and fun.

The DevOps Tribe

Here is a list of some of the most active guys in the DevOps realm. It’s by far not complete and in no special order. But if you want to learn what’s going on with DevOps, you should follow those folks.

Patrick Debois
Inventor of DevOpsDays – the conference that brings development and operations together. While many of us were thinking and talking about DevOps, we didn’t even have a forum before Patrick launched DevOpsDays 2009 in Ghent, Belgium.
Blog: Just Enough Documented Information
Twitter: @patrickdebois
Patrick’s DevOps Intro Video

Damon Edwards
President of DTO Solutions (a consulting group focused on automated infrastructure and IT process improvement)
Blog: dev2ops delivering change
Twitter: @damonedwards
Featured DevOps post: What is DevOps?

John Allspaw
At the moment, he’s VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. He’s worked at Flickr, Friendster, InfoWorld, Salon, Genentech, Volpe National Transportation Center, and a bunch of other places as a consultant from time to time.
Blog: Kitchen Soap
Twitter: @allspaw
Featured DevOps presentation: 10 deploys per day – DevOps cooperation at Flickr

Lindsay Holmwood
Lindsay Holmwood is a sysadmin/developer from Sydney, Australia.
He’s the creator of cucumber-nagios, Flapjack, Visage, and Gastro.
Blog: auxesis musings
Twitter: @auxesis

Andrew Shafer
Engineering Lead at Cloud Scaling. He is interested in public speaking, cloud computing, systems management, startups, Agile, lean, Ruby, Clojure, dynamic programming languages, motivation or whatever random thing seems interesting to you.
Blog: stochasticresonance
Twitter: @littleidea
Featured DevOps Post: Puppet, Chef, Dependencies And Worldviews

Paul Nasrat
Paul is a software developer and systems engineer from London, UK.
Blog: Pauls Wibblings
Twitter: @nasrat
Featured DevOps Post: Puppet Camp 2009

Mick Pollard
Mick’s current interests in linux/sysadmin are system deployment (pxe/kickstart) and configuration management ( puppet ). He’s also interested in all things hosting and scaling of webapps.
Blog: lunix
Twitter: @_lunix_

James Turnbull
James is an Australian free software and open source author, security specialist, and software developer contributing to the qpsmtpd SMTP daemon, the Puppet configuration management tool, and the Facter system inventory tool. He wrote books like “Pulling Strings with Puppet” and “Pro Nagios 2.0”. James lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Blog: Kartar.Net
Twitter: @kartar
Featured DevOps Post: What DevOps means to me…

Koen Van Exem
A DevOps from Mechelen, Belgium.
Blog: InxIn
Twitter: @KoenVanExem

Gildas Le Nadan
Gildas specialises in IT Operations Coaching/Infrastructures, Open Source, Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery. He is from Lille, France.
Blog: On IT Operations And Infrastructure
Twitter: @endemics
Featured DevOps Post: Self Documented Agile Infrastructure

Chris Read
Chris currently works for ThoughtWorks as a Principal Technical Consultant and Infrastructure Specialist. His specialties are Unix (any flavour) and networking. He’s done his time as a developer, but finds the path of the Sys Admin much more rewarding…
Blog: Chris Read
Twitter: @cread

Kris Buytaert
Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium , Europe and the rest of the universe.
Blog: Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem
Twitter: @KrisBuytaert

Stephen Nelson-Smith
a Technical Manager and Devop based in Hampshire, UK and author of Agile Sysadmin
Blog: Agile Sysadmin
Twitter: @lordcope
Featured DevOps Post: What Is This DevOps Thing, Anyway?

R.I. Pienaar
Systems Administrator, Consultant, Linux Guy, Automator, Ruby Coder. Currently in London, UK.
Blog: www.devco.net
Twitter: @ripienaar

Julian Simpson
Julian is helping to deliver working software, one continuous integration build at a time.
Blog: The Build Doctor
Twitter: @builddoctor

John Willis
Vice President of Training & Services at opscode, the company behind Chef.
Blog: IT MANAGEMENT AND CLOUD BLOG
Twitter: @botchagalupe
Featured DevOps Post: Does Automation Replace Humans?

Marcel Wegermann
Sysadmin, web developer and test infected – Marcel currently works for it-agile in Hamburg, Germany.
Blog: Agile System Administration
Twitter: @marcelwegermann

John Arundel
Freelance sysadmin & systems integrator, devop, hacker, geek. Likes Puppet, Drupal, agile, and a lot of other cool stuff.
Blog: Bitfield Consulting
Twitter: @bitfield

This list is brought to you by:
Matthias Marschall
CTO of autoplenum.de – hands-on involved in development and operations of the site and always seeking to make the whole company more agile end-to-end.
Blog: Agile Web Operations (you’re currently reading it 😉 )
Twitter: @mmarschall

and

Dan Ackerson
Having worked as both a developer and an operations manager, he’s gotten all too familiar with the ever widening gap between what developers and customers consider “done”. That’s why he wants to help to bridge the deployment gap.
Blog: Agile Web Operations
Twitter: @danackerson

Update (2010/06/09)

Ohad Levy
Ohad is the author of The Foreman. Foreman integrates with Puppet (and acts as web front end to it). Foreman takes care of bare bone provisioning until the point puppet is running, allowing Puppet to do what it does best.
Blog: The Foreman Blog
Twitter: @ohadl

Jesse Robbins
Jesse is a passionate advocate for DevOps/WebOps etc and co-founder and CEO of Opscode.

He ran Operations & was a principal contributor to much of Amazon’s Ops Culture. Later, he brought the “Operations” tab to O’Reilly Radar, co-founded the Velocity conference (and remains its co-chair), and helped John Allspaw edit the forthcoming Web Operations book.

He has been quoted about these ideas in a front page story in the New York Times.

Blog: Jesse Robbins | O’Reilly Radar
Twitter: @jesserobbins

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