Chris Beatty is a seasoned IT professional with a varied background in systems administration and infrastructure architecture. He is currently working for Rackspace, helping enterprise customers design and run high-performant hosted solutions.

Walter Bentley is a Rackspace private cloud solutions architect. He is a new Racker with a diverse background in production systems administration and solutions architecture. He brings over 17 years of experience across numerous industries, such as online marketing, financial, insurance, aviation, the food industry, and education. In the past, he has always been the requestor, consumer, and advisor to companies to use technologies such as OpenStack. Now, he is a promoter of the OpenStack technology and a cloud educator.

Victoria Martinez de la Cruz is a licentiate in computer sciences from the Computer Sciences and Engineering department of Universidad Nacional del Sur in Bahia Blanca, Argentina. During her last years in college, she got started with OpenStack through the GNOME Outreachy and Google Summer of Code internships. She is currently a software engineer at Red Hat and a core member of OpenStack's Trove and Zaqar projects. Her main interests are operative systems, networks, and databases. She is FOSS passionate and loves to help newcomers to get involved with open source projects. Victoria can be contacted at <[email protected]>.

Stefan Lenz works for BMW in Munich. He is a manager of the data center and cloud services division in BMW's global IT organization. In this role, he is responsible for the delivery of compute, storage, and network services for BMW worldwide.

He holds a PhD in nuclear physics from Erlangen University in Germany and has worked as a postdoctoral associate at Yale university, doing nuclear research on high-performance computers. He worked as a consultant for high-performance computing in the German automotive industry before becoming an IT architect for high-performance computers and engineering IT at BMW. From 2002 to 2014, he worked in several initiatives and projects to consolidate and globalize BMW's IT organization.

He is married, lives in Munich, and likes to ski, hike, and bike in the Alps. Together with his wife, he has written six books on hiking, mountain bike tours, and the Camino de Santiago in Spain. You can contact him on Twitter as @stefan_km_lenz or via his website www.serverfabrik.de.

Andy McCrae is a software developer at Rackspace working within the Rackspace Private Cloud team. Andy began his career in 2007 as a Linux system administrator for Rackspace after completing master's of engineering (MEng), majoring in computer science at University College London (UCL).

Andy specializes in Swift (Object Storage) and Ansible. Andy was the core contributor to OpenStack-Chef and is now working on the os-ansible-deployment community projects within OpenStack.

Recently, Andy spoke at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit on managing logging within an OpenStack environment.

Melissa Palmer is a systems engineer and architect and a virtualization, infrastructure, and OpenStack enthusiast. She has bachelor's and master's of engineering degrees focused on electrical engineering and secure networked systems design. As a strong advocate of the community, Melissa is a VMUG member and has been featured on panel discussions and podcasts for IT architecture and community programs. She is also the creative director of the Virtual Design Master challenge located at http://virtualdesignmaster.com. Melissa enjoys cooking, writing, and attending rocket launches in her free time. You can find Melissa on Twitter at @vMiss33 or on her blog at http://vMiss.net.

Sriram Rajan is a principal engineer at Rackspace, where he is responsible for designing solutions for its customers and assists them with their automation needs. Prior to Rackspace, he worked as a systems programmer at Texas State University, from where he also earned his master's degree in computer science. He has more than a decade of professional experience working with Linux systems, networks, programming, and security. In his nonprofessional life, he spends time traveling, working on home automation, watching cricket, programming for fun, and discussing technology.