23 DevOps Leaders to Follow Online

This post was updated on October 27, 2020. It was originally published on July 20, 2016.

DevOps refers to the processes, culture, and mindset that combines development and operations work within teams. Successful DevOps practices help teams shorten the software development life cycle, increase the speed of feedback loops, and allow for more frequent delivery of features, bug fixes, and updates.

If you’re curious about the latest trends in DevOps or just want to learn more from the experts, we’ve put together a list of 23 DevOps leaders who bring awesome insights to their consistently strong social media posts. Some focus on serious discussions and concrete examples while others stick to the lighter side, with jokes and personal anecdotes about DevOps culture, some of which will spice up your Twitter timeline.

John Arundel

A web operations consultant with more than three decades of system administrator experience, John Arundel is also the author of several books on Puppet, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to tweeting plenty of his own wisdom, he also routinely shares jokes and insights from the lighter side of DevOps culture.

Twitter: @bitfield

Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz is VP of Products at Docker, and Program Chair for the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit. He uses Twitter to weigh in on important cultural issues surrounding DevOps, security, and technology.

Twitter: @dberkholz

Kris Buytaert

Kris Buytaert is the Consulting CTO at Inuits, a European open source consulting firm. He has an active presence both on social media and the conference circuit, often speaking about DevOps culture. You can also keep up with his personal thoughts on his blog, Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem.

Twitter: @KrisBuytaert

Leslie Carr

Leslie Carr is the Senior Director of Engineering at Quip, a tool for enabling real-time productivity in Salesforce. She’s a data center nerd, and an advocate for open source software and cats. She frequently shares thoughts about all of the above on Twitter. You can also catch her giving talks at various conferences about both technical and cultural aspects of DevOps.

Twitter: @Lesliegeek

Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian Cockcroft is VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, with past experience at Battery Ventures, Netflix, eBay, and Sun Microsystems. Adrian’s Twitter is packed with knowledge about cloud operations, open source software, and of course, how those topics relate to everyday life.

Twitter: @adrianco

Patrick Debois

Patrick Debois is Director Of Market Strategy at Snyk, a platform for developers to find and fix vulnerabilities in open source libraries and containers. As the Founder and Advisor for DevOpsDays, Patrick Debois is responsible for coining the term DevOps and organizing the community around it. His Twitter feed features plenty of open-source tools and technologies, especially around serverless computing, but he provides plenty of DevOps and programming humor.

Twitter: @patrickdebois

Jessica DeVita

Jessica DeVita is a Senior Applied Resilience Engineer at Netflix, and brings with her a strong SRE background, having worked at major players like Microsoft and Chef. She’s also the owner of the popular Uber Geek Girl Twitter account, where she shares thoughts on DevOps culture and technology’s impact on modern life.

Twitter: @UberGeekGirl

Damon Edwards

Damon Edwards is Senior Director, Product, Rundeck at PagerDuty. A frequent conference speaker and contributor to the dev2ops.org blog, Damon Edwards focuses on DevOps and operational process topics. He regularly posts informative threads about DevOps culture on Twitter, and uses his presence to boost other great voices in the community.

Twitter: @damonedwards

Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Dr. Nicole Forsgren is VP, Research and Strategy at GitHub. She founded DevOps Research and Assessment LLC (now part of Google) and is the author of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. As a co-author of the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, she joined us to discuss the report in a webinar. As an influential voice in the DevOps community, her Twitter is packed with her own expertise, but she also shares plenty of thoughts from other great voices.

Twitter: @nicolefv

Alice Goldfuss

Alice Goldfuss is a “systems punk with years of experience working on cutting-edge container platforms.” She’s an international speaker who keynoted at LISA19 and has emceed DevOps Days Portland. Check out her helpful and popular post: How to Get Into SRE.

Twitter: @alicegoldfuss

Mirco Hering

Mirco Hering works as a Global DevOps Practice Lead at Accenture, where he’s risen through the ranks alongside the proliferation of agile culture. He wrote DevOps for the Modern Enterprise as a guide for companies looking to shift their processes to align with agile and DevOps practices.

Twitter: @mircohering

Kelsey Hightower

As a Staff Developer Advocate at Google, Kelsey Hightower tweets about containers, Kubernetes, and Golang, among other things. He’s the author of Kubernetes: Up and Running and is a tireless advocate for open source software and DevOps practices. Check out his appearance on The New Stack @ Scale Podcast: Google’s Kelsey Hightower on APIs, SLAs, Silos, and Platform Management at Scale.

Twitter: @kelseyhightower

Jez Humble

Jez Humble is the co-author of Continuous Delivery and Lean Enterprise, a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, and a Developer Advocate for Google. He also served as Deputy Director of Delivery Architecture and Infrastructure Services at 18F, and as VP at Chef and Opscode. He runs the Continuous Delivery site, and was featured in our blog post 10 Deep DevOps Thoughts From Chef’s Jez Humble.

Twitter: @jezhumble

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is co-author of The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, two novels that deal directly with DevOps and programming culture. He also co-wrote The Visible Ops Handbook to help teams implement better IT service practices. We previously shared many of his DevOps insights on the New Relic blog, including a recent Q&A on what’s required to deliver more perfect software.

Twitter: @RealGeneKim

Bridget Kromhout

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and has previously held system administrator and infrastructure roles at Pivotal and the University of Minnesota. She’s also the Lead Organizer for the Devopsdays worldwide conference series and a host for the Arrested DevOps podcast.

Twitter: @bridgetkromhout

Thomas Limoncelli

Thomas Limoncelli is a Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow, and an insightful voice in DevOps and system administration. He’s active on Twitter where he discusses both his DevOps experience and personal life, and runs Everything SysAdmin, a site devoted to the culture surrounding system and network administrators.

Twitter: @yesthattom

Beth Adele Long

Beth Adele Long is a Software Engineer at Jeli, with previous experience at New Relic focusing on site reliability, Code Fellows, and Planet Argon. She frequently speaks about the intersection of cognitive systems and site engineering.

Twitter: @bethadelelong

Gareth Rushgrove

Gareth Rushgrove runs the popular DevOps Weekly newsletter, delivering thoughts, discoveries, and suggestions with a wide community. He currently works as Director of Product Management at Snyk, a firm focused on securing open-source software implementations, and actively tweets about DevOps culture. We also interviewed him about the history and evolution of DevOps for our blog.

Twitter: @garethr

Matt Stratton

Matt Stratton is a Transformation Specialist at Red Hat, with previous experience as a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, a Customer Architect at Chef Software, and as an Infrastructure Architect at Apartments.com. He hosts the Arrested DevOps podcast with Bridget Kromhout and the team, and is a DevOps Days organizer. He frequently tweets about life and programming.

Twitter: @mattstratton

James Turnbull

James Turnbull is VP of Engineering at Timber.io, with previous executive positions at Kickstarter, Docker, Venmo, and Puppet. Turnbull is well connected, and he has a great sense of humor too, making him a great follow on both Twitter and his personal site.

Twitter: @kartar

Mandi Walls

Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, and an advocate for a holistic approach to DevOps. She specializes in web application operations and large scale web issues, such as DevOps workflows. Her Twitter feed is a delightful mixture of tech, wry process observations, and geeky content curation.

Twitter: @lnxchk

John Willis

While those who spend time on DevOps Twitter might know him as Botchagalupe, John Willis is the Senior Director, Global Transformation Office at Red Hat. He’s a prolific voice in the DevOps community, with several books, and plenty of original presentations at major conferences listed on his GitHub page.

Twitter: @botchagalupe

Michael Winslow

Michael Winslow is a Senior Director, Software Development and Engineering at Comcast, with previous experience as a Senior Java Developer and Scrum Master at Oracle. He has a passion for collaboration and mentorship, which is reflected in his Twitter, where he’s always looking for input and providing great insight.

Twitter: @michaelswinslow