Will Foster is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in 1996, to pursue a degree in english. He was a performing member of the Summerall Guards, the elite close order Prussian drill unit, as well as a cadet officer within the Tango Company class of 2000. He also holds a degree in technical writing from Appalachian State University and is a Red Hat Certified Engineer.

Since 2000, Will has been working as a UNIX/Linux systems administrator involved in mission-critical, customer-facing production business environments. A lifelong skateboard enthusiast, Will had a brief stint as a snowboard instructor during 2000-2001.

Will has been working at Red Hat since 2007 as a senior systems administrator / DevOps engineer managing enterprise IT storage and core infrastructure. Currently, he works in the OpenStack deployment team. This team designs, architects, and builds laboratories and infrastructure to test and vet real-world customer deployments and cloud scenarios. They also collaborate with the upstream development community and partners to improve and build upon the OpenStack platform.

Will currently resides in Dublin, Ireland, and works in the same development operations deployment team as the author, Dan Radez.

Mostafa A. Hamid is an information systems engineer from State University of New York (SUNY), Potsdam. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Rational Unified Process (RUP) architect, and has a Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC). Besides these, he has certifications in JavaScript, PHP, Backbone.js, and ethical hacking from SUNY Potsdam. He is also a certified Java programmer from American University, Cairo.

Mostafa has worked with Manon Systems. He has also worked as a technical support engineer for United Systems, TP-LINK, and Hilton Worldwide. He was employed as an ICT teacher at MOIS and is currently working as a software developer at Wassaq. Mostafa has contributed to PHP classes and was nominated for an award. He currently contributes to United Nations, Launchpad.net, and Stackoverflow.org.

Alvaro Lopez Ortega is a well-known leader in the open source community. He is member of the GNU project and a contributor to OpenStack. He's also a former GNOME developer and OpenSolaris core contributor. He is a veteran speaker at open source conferences worldwide.

Currently, Alvaro works as an engineering manager for OpenStack R&D at Red Hat. During 15 years of his professional career, Alvaro held several leader positions with technology companies around the open source ecosystem, including product strategy engineering management at Canonical and OpenSolaris technical lead at Sun Microsystems.

Clay Shelor has worked as an English teacher, in network operations, and as a team leader doing IT staff augmentation. He loves to gather information, put the pieces together, implement a project, and then write about it for others to learn. When not at work, he enjoys time with the family, reading, music, and tug of war with the family dog.