Follow The Builders: 21 DevOps builders to follow in 2021

With the first-ever ACG Community Summit coming up on June 28–30, we’re recognizing some amazing humans in the cloud who inspire us to build better, more inclusive cloud applications.

Previously, we covered our top AWS builders and Azure builders you should follow. This week, we’re looking at DevOps builders, SREs, and architecture/systems people. Some of these folks are more on the leadership side of DevOps, but they’re still “builders” in the sense that they’re directly involved with creating DevOps cultures and practices inside their organizations.

These people have had a massive influence on the community through their work, but social media “reach” wasn’t a primary consideration for this list. Rather, we sought active technical contributors to the cloud community.

Get ready to smash those like, subscribe, and follow buttons — here are 21 DevOps builders you should be following in 2021.

Twitter: @brianleroux 

Brian LeRoux is a Canadian web developer, speaker, cofounder of Begin.com, and an AWS Serverless Hero. He spoke at Serverlessconf about Faster CloudFormation Delivery with OpenJS Architect. 

Keep up with Brian at www.brian.io.

Master your DevOps knowledge with an AWS DevOps Certification!

Twitter: @bellmar 

Marianne Bellotti has built data infrastructure for the UN, tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of the United States Digital Service, ran Platform Services at Auth0, and currently runs Identity and Access Control at Rebellion Defense.

She’s the author of Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (And Future Proof Modern Ones), and she’s chatted with us on the ACG blog about application modernization and the future of COBOL. 

Stay up to date on all things Marianne at bellmar.medium.com.

Twitter: @ahidalgosre 

Alex Hidalgo is the Director of Site Reliability Engineering at Nobl9, has held senior SRE positions at Google and Squarespace, and has traveled the world training other SREs. He was one of the primary developers of the Google IT Professional Certification program, contributed to The Site Reliability Workbook, and is the author of The SLO Book. He’s talked with ACG about how to think like an SRE.

Learn more about Alex at www.alex-hidalgo.com.

Twitter: @bryson3gps 

Bryson Tyrrell is a Staff Systems Development Engineer at Jamf. He’s spoken at numerous conferences and is a member of the AWS Community Builders. Bryson has written for the ACG blog about why you should always use DynamoDB global tables now and AWS’s EC2 Mac instances.

He’s on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/brysontyrrell.

Twitter: @jessitron 

Software developer, consultant, and symmathecist Jessica (AKA JessiTRON) is such a prolific producer of outstanding content that you might actually think she’s a robot. She's into resilience engineering, domain-driven design, and (of course) DevOps. She’s talked with us about the future of DevOps. 

You can find her work at www.jessitron.com and www.systemsthinking.dev or listen to her as a panelist on the Greater Than Code and Arrested DevOps podcasts.

Twitter: @DonovanBrown 

Donovan Brown is a Partner Program Manager in the Azure CTO Incubations team at Microsoft, a certified Scrum Master, and a former Process Consultant. He’s traveled the world helping companies develop solutions using agile practices, Visual Studio, and Team Foundation Server. He’s talked with ACG about post-COVID DevOps, and he’s been ranked as high as #11 in the world of Professional Air Hockey. (That second one doesn’t have much to do with DevOps, but it’s pretty awesome all the same.)

Keep up with Donovan at www.donovanbrown.com.

Twitter: @nicolefv 

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is a DevOps and developer productivity expert who works with engineering organizations to make work better. She is the lead author on Accelerate and the State of DevOps Reports. She's also the VP of Research & Strategy at GitHub, a technical founder/CEO with a successful exit to Google, and a member of ACM Queue's Editorial Board. 

Nicole blogs at www.nicolefv.com.

Twitter: @mipsytipsy 

Charity is an ops engineer, a former product engineering manager at Facebook, co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering, and “accidental startup founder” at Honeycomb, where she’s CTO. Charity is a familiar face around ACG, chatting with us in our Operations: Past, Present, and Glorious Future webinar and writing about why you can’t debug systems with dashboards and the future of ops jobs.

Keep up with Charity at www.charity.wtf.

Twitter: @lizthegrey 

Liz Fong-Jones is Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, a labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 16+ years of experience working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights. She has talked with ACG about the state of cloud and AWS predictions. 

Stay up to date on all things Liz at www.lizthegrey.com.

Twitter: @IanColdwater 

Ian Coldwater is Kubernetes SIG Security co-chair and an Architect at Twilio, who specializes in hacking and hardening Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native infrastructure.

Twitter: @t3rabytes 

Blake Stoddard is Senior Development & Operations Engineer at Epic Games and former Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Basecamp / HEY. He’s chatted with ACG about scaling up on AWS and Kubernetes.

Twitter: @alexwlchan 

Alex Chan is a software developer at the Wellcome Trust presenting Wellcome’s assets through consistent, well-designed APIs. (Note from the editor/resident museum nerd: If you’re in London, the Wellcome Collection is a brilliant and bizarre free museum that stands out in a city filled with outstanding museums.)

Alex is active on Twitter and their blog.

Twitter: @ScooterPhoenix 

Angela Andrews is a solutions architect at Red Hat. She’s an AWS Certified Solutions Architect with 20 years IT experience and co-host of Red Hat’s upcoming Compiler Podcast and the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience.

Get up to speed on Angela at www.angelawandrews.com.

Twitter: @DivineOps 

Sasha Rosenbaum is a Senior Manager on the Managed OpenShift Black Belt (MOBB) team at Red Hat, where she helps enterprise customers migrate to managed OpenShift on customers’ favorite public cloud. She’s a former Sr. Program Manager at GitHub and Microsoft, an organizer of DevOpsDays Chicago, a chair of DeliveryConf, a speaker, podcaster, and the author of Serverless Computing in Azure with .NET.

Keep up with Sasha at www.sasharosenbaum.com.

Twitter: @skamille 

Camille Fournier is an engineer, CTO, member of the Apache ZooKeeper community, and author of The Manager’s Path. She’s an experienced leader with a combo of deep technical expertise, executive leadership, and engineering management who’s into “distributed systems, dysfunctional programming, and all that management gobbledegook.” 

Check out her site www.camilletalk.com or her blog at www.elidedbranches.com.

Twitter: @nora_js

Nora Jones is the founder and CEO of Jeli. Previously, she was in senior technical leadership roles at Netflix, Slack, Jet.com, and Alarm.com. She’s the co-author of Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice, creator of Learning from Incidents in Software, and has a passion for the intersection of software and people.

Twitter: @Nick_Craver 

Nick Craver is a Microsoft MVP and the Architecture Lead for Stack Exchange. He’s passionate about open source and the sharing of experiences that help save others time when building. He maintains many open source projects, including Opserver, StackExchange.Exceptional, MiniProfiler, StackExchange.Redis, and Dapper.

You can find Nick over at www.nickcraver.com, as well as Stack Overflow and GitHub.

Twitter: @reinh 

Rein Henrichs is Principal Software Engineer at Procore Technologies. He calls himself a “software developer who spends more time thinking about systems made with people than systems made with computers.” You can find Rein on GitHub, as a host on the podcast Greater Than Code, and as a regular guest on Arrested DevOps. 

Twitter: @rishabk7 

Rishab calls himself a “cloud engineer learning DevOps.” He may be newer to the world of DevOps, but we’re big fans of what we’ve seen so far. He’s an active member of the ACG community, participating in our cloud resume challenge, and he’s quick to give back to the community, sharing projects and useful resources like a study guide for the AZ-104 Azure Administrator.

You can (and should) check out Rishab’s blog or find him on GitHub.

Twitter: @srhtcn 

Serhat Can is an engineer who has built and operated products as part of Atlassian’s Opsgenie team since 2015. As an engineer and DevOps evangelist, he's passionate about helping teams build better on-call and incident response practices. He’s an AWS Community Hero, a blogger, an event organizer, a speaker, and helps coordinate DevOpsDays in more than 80 cities worldwide. He’s the author of the eBook On Call: The Definitive Guide to Running Productive and Happy On-Call Teams. 

Twitter: @dbsmasher 

Silvia Botros is a Senior Principal Engineer at Twilio who describes herself as “Emily Blunt in the Edge of Tomorrow....but for databases.” When she’s not trying to break databases or find bugs in software, she’s a regular at conferences and on podcasts.

Besides Twitter, you can keep up with Silvia at www.blog.dbsmasher.com or on GitHub.

There are hundreds of years of engineering experience represented above. And every one of these people has demonstrated a commitment to further that experience while sharing it publicly. That’s an extraordinary opportunity, and we recommend you take advantage of it today. Follow the builders!

Whether you are a developer or not, working alone or in a team, Azure DevOps training can help you organize the way you plan, create and deliver software.

Next time, we’ll share our list of the top Google Cloud builders. In the meantime, what other outstanding DevOps builders do you follow? Tag them on Twitter so others can find them too!