Shichao An is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). He uses Fedora as his desktop operating system. Shichao received his master's degree in computer science from the New York University. Currently, he works as a system administrator and focuses on managing Amazon EC2 servers and containerizes applications with Docker. Shichao is enthusiastic about open source and is active on GitHub, where he hosts some small projects and shares his learning roadmaps.

Alexey Maksimov is an IT professional raised in Russia. He has been living in New Zealand since 2008. He holds a diploma in mathematics and specializes in systems programming. During his extensive 15-year-long career, Alexey has gained broad infrastructure support experience from top notch enterprise-grade environments, such as Vodafone (New Zealand) and Mobile Telesystems (Russia).

Alexey's main area of interest is Oracle database administration. However, his skills also include impressive hands-on knowledge of networks and a range of UNIX-based systems, including Red Hat Linux, Oracle Linux, and Oracle Solaris, backed by industry certifications.

Alexey can be reached on LinkedIn at http://linkedin.com/in/newrnz/ or on his personal website at http://newr.co.nz/.

His healthy mix of skills enable him to speak to other professionals in their language, understand and solve their challenges, collaborate effectively, and see the big picture beyond the fence of his job description, delivering a tremendous value to his employer. He has also worked as a professional IT trainer, which is very important if you are writing or reviewing books.

Ranjith Rajaram is employed as a senior technical account manager at a leading open source Enterprise Linux company.

He started his career providing support to web hosting companies and managing servers remotely. Ranjith has also provided technical support to their end customers. Early in his career, he worked on Linux, Unix, and FreeBSD platforms.

For the past 12 years, he has been continuously learning something new. This is what he likes and admires about technical support. As a mark of respect to all his fellow technical support engineers, he has included "developing software is humane but supporting them is divine" in his e-mail signature.

At his current organization, he is involved in implementing, installing, and troubleshooting Linux environment networks. Apart from this, he is also an active contributor to the Linux container space, especially using Docker-formatted containers.