Expert in cloud architectures and IT infrastructures based on OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes and Ansible, active since 2001 on the design and implementation of clusters, distributed systems and virtualization systems, is a first-rate trainer, consultant and PM with international experience. PhD in Computer Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome, has worked for more than 2 years at University College London and has founded Binario Etico, company focused on Cloud Computing and IT Automation.

Heidi leads the foundation's efforts to grow and nurture a strong ecosystem around OpenStack.
Heidi has spent over 15 years in the technology world in leadership positions with companies in Silicon Valley and in Seattle including Netscape, Red Herring, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. She originally launched her career in banking spending nine years with Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wells Fargo and Hambrecht & Quist before falling in love with cutting edge technology when her bank (H&Q) was taking Netscape public . She made the career leap to Netscape and tech and has never looked back! Her passions besides game changing technologies, are cycling, skiing, music and almost any sport that involves speed.

Jan van Eldik studied experimental High-Energy Physics at the University of Amsterdam, working on the DELPHI experiment during the 1990’s. He joined CERN’s IT department in 2000, and has been working as a Service Manager in a variety of services – monitoring, data, virtualization.Since 2012, Jan has been leading the team that operates CERN’s private OpenStack cloud. This service provides resources to the physics experiments and other customer groups in the organization, and has grown to an infrastructure of 150.000 cores, providing Virtual Machines, Block Storage and Containers to end-users.

Born in Bergamo, Italy, where I spent my growing up years and earlier professional experiences. At age 12, I got my first Win3.1 PC enabling me to run command line and others funny stuff like Sensible Soccer. Ever since then, I find computers fascinating and spent many good hours exploring technology and what it can do for all of us. After some years as IT Project Manager and Technology consultant i joined Alchelabo’s challenges embracing true opensource philosophy and bringing my contribute to make OpenStack accessible to every company.

More than twenty years experience in information technologies, with in-depth expertise on the Open Source world and Cybersecurity. He is engaged on cloud migration strategies with architectures where Openstack, Ansible and Docker runs. Involved for Fata Informatica as Principal Project Manager in national and international projects he is also an active cybersecurity teacher in “Train the trainer” sessions for national security agencies Today it is one of the pillars of the company, thanks to the high level of professionalism achieved and runs successfully the Sentinet3 project, the only Italian system included in the Gartner's Market Guide for IT Monitoring Tools

Giovanni Merlino earned his Electronics Engineering degree from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Messina (UniMe) and his international PhD degree in Computer and Telecommunications Engineering from the Department of Engineering (DIEEI) at the University of Catania (UniCt). Until 2012 he worked as manager for the EGI (Grid) site belonging to the Faculty of Engineering at UniMe. He has worked as Contractor at UniMe for a EU-funded POR project about sensing devices, Cloud computing, and power management strategies. He is now research fellow at UniMe under the EU H2020 BEACON project, including leadership of testbed management activities, as well as UniMe node manager for XI-FI and a long-standing member of the Mobile and Distributed Systems Lab (MDSLab) at UniMe. His research activity is currently focused on mobile and distributed systems with particular emphasis on Cloud paradigms, Edge computing, Internet of Things, Network Virtualization, Smart sensors, and crowdsensing, co-leading the design of Stack4Things, an OpenStack-based Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service framework for I/Oclouds, co-authoring over 50 papers in international journals and conferences, participating in technical program committees of international conferences, as well as spearheading efforts for an official and crowdfunded research initiative (#SmartME) to deploy and operate an experimental Smart City testbed in Messina. Since 2013 he is teaching assistant at UniMe for the course in Computer Networks and since 2014 for the course in Embedded Systems too. Since 2015 he is teaching assistant at UniMe for the course in Distributed Systems and there acknowledged as Fellow (italian title: “Cultore della Materia”) in Distributed Systems as well. He is co-founder of the SmartMe.io (http://smartme.io) academic spin-off company.

Started working on NFV projects based on Openstack since 2014. He is a DevOps Expert embracing Everything as Code philosophy.
Consultant and trainer, he daily works with technologies like Openstack, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, Openshift helping customers to build fully automated workflows starting from Infrastructure-as-a-Code to Continuous Deployment.

Roberto Reale sports a mixed background, in humanities, mathematics, economics, and information technology. Since the late ‘90s he has grown more and more interested in open community models and open source projects: eager to “get his hands dirty”, he contributes to the GNU Find Utilities and the Hurd OS project, by the Free Software Foundation. On a professional side, he has served as a software developer, system and database administrator, data architect, and project manager; today he strives to help businesses and public agencies to overcome a long-established fear for digital transformation. As the proud founder of Viduo, a think tank focused on the digital citizenship, he believes in technology as an enabler for democracy. Roberto is also a member of the Italian Association for Machine Learning and the Roman chapter of Legal Hackers.