Drew Firment

SVP of Cloud Transformation at A Cloud Guru, a Pluralsight Company

Drew works closely with business and technology leaders to accelerate cloud adoption by migrating talent to the cloud. Drew was previously Director of Cloud Engineering at Capital One where he led enterprise cloud operations within their Cloud Center of Excellence and migrated the early adopters of Amazon Web Services (AWS) into production. He founded Capital One's cloud engineering college that drove a large-scale talent transformation, and earned a patent for measuring cloud adoption and maturity. Drew is recognized by Amazon as an AWS Community Hero for his ongoing efforts to build inclusive and sustainable learning communities.

Aaron Skonnard

Pluralsight Co-Founder and CEO

Aaron is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he serves as the Chief Executive Officer. Aaron has spent years developing course materials and teaching professional developers throughout the world. He has presented at many popular developer conferences like PDC, TechEd, and VSLive! Microsoft recognized Aaron as an MVP in the "Connected Systems" developer community for eight years. Aaron has written numerous books, articles, and whitepapers including the Essential XML Quick Reference (Addison Wesley, 2001), Essential XML (Addison Wesley, 2000), and his popular columns in MSDN Magazine. Aaron lives in Utah with his wife Monica and five children Michelle, Michael, Nathan, Gisela, and Emma.

Amanda Knight

Director of Engineering Transformation

Amanda Knight is the Global Director of Engineering Transformation, where she work with organizations who are embarking on ambitious technology transformation projects, especially those involving cloud. Previously the Director of Enterprise Architecture Innovation & Strategy at TeamHealth, one of the largest healthcare staffing companies in the United States. Amanda led engineering architecture, innovation, and cloud strategy by driving upskilling in modern architecture and cloud then applying that knowledge to create a solution worth 5M in YOY revenue, by using the newly developed skills leveraging Pluralsight platform applying those skills in a Innovation Challenge. She was also responsible for the architecture Center of Excellence, engineering transformation leading the cloud maturity journey. Today, she applies this experience and successful framework to make learning activities drive valuable outcomes for clients globally.

Stephen Orban

Stephen joined Google Cloud in 2022 to develop strategy and programs for customers migrating to GCP. Prior to Google Cloud, Stephen was with AWS for the past eight years, most recently serving as Vice President of AWS Marketplace, partner engineering and ISVs. At AWS, he led AWS Marketplace, invented and built AWS Data Exchange, and AWS’s global enterprise strategy. Prior to that, he served as the CTO and CIO at Dow Jones. Stephen is the co-author of Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT, which demonstrates the importance of reskilling people, evolving processes, and transforming cultures as enterprise seek a move to the cloud.

David Linthicum

Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte

David Linthicum is a top technology innovator in cloud computing, edge computing, and security concepts. David is a best-selling author of over 15 books and over 7,000 articles. He’s pioneered many business-related technology concepts, including Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). He’s an innovator within Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing—especially the use of cloud computing for digital transformations. David currently serves as Deloitte’s Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, where he drives new innovations and market offerings, leads people and projects, and provides thought leadership.

Jonathan Allen

Director, Enterprise Strategy at AWS

Jonathan joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist & Evangelist in May 2017. In this role, he works with enterprise technology executives around the globe to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers. Prior to joining AWS, Jonathan was Chief Technology Officer and Senior Director in Capital One's UK division. Jonathan was part of the bank's Global Technology Leadership team that selected AWS as their Predominant Cloud Partner in 2014, and was accountable for architecting, engineering and execution of the technical build out and system migrations of the bank's AWS Cloud strategy in partnership with the US divisions until 2017, by which time all development had moved Cloud-First. Jonathan is the co-author of Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader's Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud, which outlines leadership best practices from those powering their innovation with AWS, upskilling and reskilling their organizations to achieve cloud fluency at scale, and attracting and retaining top engineering talent.

David is a Webby Award winning cloud development consultant that focuses on cloud native web, mobile, and IoT applications. For over fifteen years as a consultant David has led custom software development on emerging platforms for companies such as FedEx, AT&T, Sony Music, Intel, Comcast, Herman Miller, Principal Financial, and Adobe (as well as many others). David regularly writes and speaks on the digital landscape with published works for O'Reilly and Lynda.com. He has written for Mashable, Smashing Magazine, and VentureBeat, and he has spoken at events like AdTech, Interop, and Adobe Max.

Faye Ellis is Principal Training Architect, specialising in AWS, responsible for the AWSCertified Developer Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate and Security Specialty courses. Her other courses include Hands-On Troubleshooting With AWS, Hands-On Chaos Engineering, and EKS Basics. She also researches, writes and presents AWS This Week, a YouTube show designed to summarise the latest AWS updates. Faye has worked in the IT industry for around 20 years, working in SysOps, DevOps and Architecture roles with mission critical systems across a wide range of industries including financial services, telecommunications, government and healthcare. Faye is super passionate about cloud technology and understands firsthand how important it is to keep your skills up to date so that you can get to work on the coolest projects out there.