50 Influential DevOps Thought Leaders Globally (2026)

Last updated: June 2026

The most useful starting point for anyone building a DevOps reading list or following the global conversation on software delivery is this: the people who are genuinely shaping how software is built, delivered, and operated at scale today are not always the same names that appear on every generic technology list. The leaders in this guide have created the frameworks, written the books, built the research, and run the communities that define modern software delivery.

As of June 2026, the field has grown substantially since Patrick Debois coined the word DevOps at the first DevOpsDays event in Ghent in 2009.

The 2025 DORA report, drawing on nearly 5,000 technology professionals worldwide, shifted its very title from "State of DevOps" to "State of AI-Assisted Software Development," reflecting how profoundly the field has evolved. Nearly 90 percent of teams now use AI in their daily work, up 14 percent from the previous year.

Platform engineering has reached mainstream adoption, with over 55 percent of organisations now operating dedicated platform teams as of 2025, with Gartner forecasting that figure will reach 80 percent across software engineering organisations by 2026. The 50 people on this list are among the primary reasons those numbers are credible.

This guide surfaces the leaders who genuinely deserve to be as widely known as the household names in this space. Each person was selected based on documented, current contribution to DevOps practice, active engagement with the broader conversation in 2025 or 2026, and meaningful representation of the geographic and disciplinary diversity of the global DevOps community.

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Why DevOps Matters in 2026

DevOps is the set of practices, cultural norms, and organisational patterns that enable software teams to deliver high-quality software frequently, reliably, and safely. It bridges the traditional divide between software development and IT operations, automating the path from code commit to production and building the feedback loops that allow teams to learn from every deployment.

The simplest illustration of its impact lies in measurement: high-performing DevOps teams deploy code on demand, recover from failures in under an hour, and maintain change failure rates far below industry averages.

The research backing these claims is among the most rigorous in the software industry. The DORA research programme, led by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble and later absorbed by Google Cloud, has studied software delivery performance across tens of thousands of technology professionals globally.

Their work proved that software delivery performance predicts organisational performance, and that faster delivery and better stability reinforce rather than trade off against each other. Their four core metrics, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore service, are now the standard for how engineering teams measure themselves.

In 2026, that research has expanded into the human dimensions of delivery: how team cognitive load, platform maturity, and psychological safety predict delivery outcomes. The result is a field that has moved well beyond "automate your deployments" into a sophisticated, evidence-based understanding of how organisations, teams, and tools work together to create sustainable high performance.

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How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on the basis of documented, current contribution to the DevOps field through published work, institutional roles, practitioner output, community building, or research confirmed through independent sources in 2025 or 2026. The list is organised into eight thematic categories reflecting the main intellectual and practical currents in DevOps today.

The 50 people represent at least eight countries across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, and span a range of career stages from movement founders to rising practitioners.

Category 1: Founders and Pioneers of the DevOps Movement

DevOps did not emerge from a single company or manifesto. It grew from conversations between practitioners independently discovering the same problems: how to get code from developers into production faster, more safely, and without the walls between teams that made software delivery slow and expensive. The people in this category started those conversations, built the first communities, and wrote the foundational documents that gave the movement its name, its ideas, and its global momentum.

1. Gene Kim

Among the most prolific contributors to DevOps thought leadership over the past two decades, Gene Kim founded IT Revolution to publish the books, papers, and events that advance the field. His novel The Phoenix Project, co-authored with Kevin Behr and George Spafford, introduced DevOps ideas to a general technology leadership audience; The Unicorn Project followed with a developer-centric perspective.

His co-authored The DevOps Handbook, written with Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis, and Nicole Forsgren, remains the most comprehensive practitioner guide in the field, and his co-authored Wiring the Winning Organization, with Steven Spear, connects DevOps to the broader science of organisational excellence. Gene Kim's books have collectively sold over one million copies.

Kim's particular contribution is his consistent insistence on connecting technical practices to organisational outcomes, drawing on lean manufacturing, W. Edwards Deming, and systems thinking to explain why DevOps works at the level of the whole organisation. His podcast The Idealcast features deep conversations with researchers and practitioners who have grappled with the same problems of flow, feedback, and learning.

His annual DevOps Enterprise Summit remains the leading gathering for enterprise DevOps practitioners globally.

2. Nicole Forsgren

Nicole Forsgren is a Partner at Microsoft Research and has done more than almost anyone alive to place DevOps on an empirical foundation. As the lead investigator of the DORA research programme, she designed and conducted the largest studies ever undertaken on software delivery performance, producing the data that allows organisations to measure where they stand and what to change.

Her book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, co-authored with Jez Humble and Gene Kim, won the Shingo Publication Award and became the most cited work in the field. Her most recent book, Frictionless: 7 Steps to Remove Barriers, Unlock Value, and Outpace Your Competition in the Age of AI (2024), extends that research into the AI era.

As a Partner at Microsoft Research, Forsgren continues to produce original research on developer productivity, engineering culture, and the measurement of software delivery. She is widely recognised as the leading scientist applying rigorous methodology to questions about how technology organisations work, and her work has directly influenced how companies across every sector evaluate and improve their engineering teams.

3. Patrick Debois

In 2009, Patrick Debois organised the first DevOpsDays event in Ghent, Belgium, and in doing so gave the movement its name. That single act of community building launched what became a global conference series now running in dozens of cities on every inhabited continent. Debois is currently the Director of DevOps Relations and Advisor at Snyk, where he applies his decades of experience in software delivery and operations to the security tooling space.

His contribution to the field is both historical and ongoing: as a practitioner, writer, and community connector, he continues to bridge the communities of development, operations, and security.

His core insight, that the wall between developers and operations was cultural and organisational before it was technical, remains as relevant in 2026 as when he first articulated it. His conference talks and blog posts continue to appear as reference points for practitioners who want to understand DevOps from its original intent: collaboration, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement rather than tool selection and process compliance.

4. John Willis

John Willis is the Senior Director of the Global Transformation Office at Red Hat and one of the founding voices of the DevOps movement. He is the co-author of The DevOps Handbook, written with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and Nicole Forsgren, and has since authored or co-authored Beyond the Phoenix Project, Investments Unlimited, and Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.

The Deming book reflects Willis's deep engagement with the intellectual history of quality management and its application to modern software delivery.

His ongoing thought leadership insists on the non-technical dimensions of DevOps, the role of management, the importance of learning organisations, and the relevance of quality science to the challenges engineering teams face. He is a sought-after speaker and a generous contributor to the communities that keep the DevOps conversation substantive rather than merely commercial.

5. John Allspaw

John Allspaw's 2009 Velocity Conference talk with Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr," helped spark the conversations that would become the DevOps movement. As former CTO at Etsy, Allspaw built one of the most celebrated DevOps cultures in the world during a formative period for the field.

He is the co-founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs, the author of The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations, and the author of the foreword to the first edition of The DevOps Handbook.

His post-Etsy work at Adaptive Capacity Labs focuses on resilience engineering, human factors, and incident analysis. His research-informed perspective on how complex software systems fail and how teams learn from those failures has influenced the design of incident analysis practices across the industry.

His blog, Kitchen Soap, remains one of the most thoughtful voices on the intersection of software operations, human factors, and systems safety science.

6. Kris Buytaert

Kris Buytaert is one of the original organisers of the DevOps movement in Europe and a practitioner and community builder whose influence has extended across the continent for more than fifteen years. Working as Consulting CTO at Inuits.eu and O11y.eu, he has spent his career building open source infrastructure, promoting DevOps culture, and speaking at conferences across Europe and beyond.

He co-organised the first European DevOpsDays in Ghent in 2009 alongside Patrick Debois.

His blog, Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem, has become both a practitioner meme and a genuine resource for engineers navigating the real-world complexity of distributed systems. His technical depth in open source tooling, Linux infrastructure, and observability gives his community contributions a grounding in actual practice that distinguishes him from more strategically oriented voices in the field.

Category 2: Research, Measurement, and the Science of Software Delivery

Understanding what actually works in software delivery requires rigorous research, not just anecdote. The people in this category have built the empirical foundations that allow organisations to move from "we think DevOps is good" to "here is what the data says about which specific practices predict performance at scale."

7. Jez Humble

Jez Humble is one of the architects of modern continuous delivery practice and a co-founder of DORA, the research programme that produced the most rigorous data on software delivery performance ever collected. He is the co-author of Continuous Delivery, written with Dave Farley, which won the Jolt Excellence Award in 2011, and co-author of Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook.

His role as a technology advocate for Google Cloud and a lecturer at UC Berkeley keeps him actively engaged with both practitioner and academic communities.

His specific contribution is the deployment pipeline: the automated, version-controlled, feedback-rich path from code commit to production release that is now the architectural standard for any high-performing software delivery organisation. The principles he codified in Continuous Delivery are now taught in computer science programmes globally and implemented in every major cloud provider's CI/CD platform.

8. Dave Farley

Dave Farley is the founder and managing director of Continuous Delivery Ltd and one of the most active educators in the DevOps and continuous delivery space globally. As the co-author of Continuous Delivery, written with Jez Humble, the sole author of Modern Software Engineering and Continuous Delivery Pipelines, and the creator of one of the most widely watched YouTube channels in the field, he is a practitioner-educator of unusual breadth and depth.

Based in the UK, he continues to consult, speak at conferences, and produce content connecting foundational continuous delivery thinking to current questions including AI-assisted development and platform engineering.

His 2022 book Modern Software Engineering argues that software development should be treated as an empirical science, subject to the same standards of feedback and iteration as any engineering discipline. That framing has proved influential for practitioners wanting to move beyond tool-specific advice toward a principled understanding of why certain practices produce better outcomes.

9. Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks and one of the most widely followed writers and speakers in software architecture and agile development. His website, martinfowler.com, has been a reference point for software practitioners for over two decades, covering patterns of enterprise application architecture, continuous integration, evolutionary design, and the relationship between architecture and delivery.

A March 2026 interview on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast confirmed his ongoing engagement with the implications of AI for software design.

Fowler's contribution to DevOps thought leadership is primarily architectural: the design principles that make software amenable to continuous delivery. His work on microservices, including the foundational 2014 article co-authored with James Lewis, deployment patterns, and trunk-based development provides the architectural foundations on which DevOps practice builds.

His bliki posts on continuous integration, feature flags, and delivery practices remain standard references for the field.

Category 3: Observability and Site Reliability Engineering

Site reliability engineering and observability answer the question that continuous delivery raises: once you ship software frequently, how do you know what is happening in production? The people in this category have built the frameworks, tools, and conceptual vocabulary that allow engineering teams to understand their systems, respond to incidents, and improve reliability over time.

10. Liz Fong-Jones

As a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb, Liz Fong-Jones is one of the most active and respected voices in the observability and SRE communities globally. Her career spans over two decades, from her years as an SRE at Google working on products including Google Cloud Load Balancer and Google Flights, to her current role advocating for the SRE and observability communities at Honeycomb.

She is the co-author of Observability Engineering, written with Charity Majors and George Miranda, which has become the standard reference for teams transitioning from traditional monitoring to modern observability practice.

Fong-Jones's particular contribution is connecting the technical mechanics of observability, including structured events, distributed tracing, and the core analysis loop, to the organisational and cultural conditions that allow those practices to flourish. She spoke at SREcon 2025, YOW! Australia 2025, and numerous other conferences, maintaining one of the most active and substantive public presences in the field.

11. Charity Majors

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io and one of the people most responsible for bringing the idea of observability as a distinct discipline into mainstream software engineering. Before co-founding Honeycomb, she built and managed distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab.

She is the co-author of Observability Engineering, written with Liz Fong-Jones and George Miranda, and Database Reliability Engineering, and a second edition of Observability Engineering is in preparation for 2026.

Her specific intellectual contribution is the "test in production" mindset: the argument that modern distributed systems cannot be fully validated in staging environments, and that building observability into your system is the only realistic approach to understanding production behaviour. Her writing on the shift from monitoring to observability has shaped how a generation of engineering teams think about what it means to own software in production.

12. John Arundel

John Arundel is a British author and independent consultant with more than thirty years of experience in web operations and cloud infrastructure. His book Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, co-authored with Justin Domingus, is one of the most widely used practical guides to Kubernetes adoption, offering technical depth with the accessibility that practitioners actually need when implementing new systems.

He has also written books on Puppet and Go programming.

His contribution to the DevOps practitioner community is the quality of his technical documentation: books that respect readers as intelligent professionals and give them the knowledge needed to make sound architectural and operational decisions. In an age of overproduced conference marketing and vendor-driven content, his commitment to independent, practitioner-focused writing makes him a particularly valuable resource for engineers and engineering leaders.

Category 4: Platform Engineering and Team Design

Platform engineering has emerged as the organisational discipline sitting at the intersection of DevOps and software architecture: building the internal developer platforms, golden paths, and team structures that allow product engineering teams to move fast without reinventing foundational infrastructure on every project.

13. Matthew Skelton

Matthew Skelton is the CEO and CTO of Conflux and the co-author of Team Topologies, written with Manuel Pais, one of the most influential books on software organisation published in the past decade. The Team Topologies framework, which defines four types of teams and three modes of team interaction, has been adopted by technology organisations across every sector globally since its original publication in 2019.

The second edition, published by IT Revolution in September 2025, deepens the core concepts and addresses the organisational implications of AI agents and distributed autonomous systems. At QCon London in March 2026, Skelton presented the case for Team Topologies as "infrastructure for agency" in managing AI agents within enterprise technology systems.

Skelton's contribution to DevOps is the connection between team design and software architecture: the insight that the structure of your teams will inevitably reflect the structure of your software, and that intentional team design is therefore an engineering decision, not only a management preference. His work draws together concepts from Conway's Law, lean flow, and cognitive load theory to produce a practical model organisations can use to redesign themselves for fast, sustainable delivery.

14. Manuel Pais

Manuel Pais is the co-author of Team Topologies, written with Matthew Skelton, and an independent consultant working at the intersection of sociotechnical systems, organisational design, and software delivery. Based in Portugal, he brings a distinctly European perspective to a field where North American and UK voices predominate.

His LinkedIn content in 2025 and 2026 has focused on the evolving relationship between team design, platform engineering, and the governance of AI agents within engineering organisations.

His particular contribution is the concept of cognitive load as a primary constraint on team performance: the argument that teams cannot perform well when overwhelmed by the variety and volume of work they are asked to manage, and that platform engineering is in large part the discipline of reducing that load through golden paths, self-service tooling, and clear domain boundaries. The second edition of Team Topologies (2025) deepens these ideas and addresses new complexities introduced by AI-assisted and autonomous systems.

15. Viktor Farcic

Viktor Farcic is a developer advocate and content creator based in Barcelona, working at Upbound and active as a member of the CNCF Ambassadors, Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and GitHub Stars communities. His YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit and his podcast DevOps Paradox, co-hosted with Darin Pope, are among the most widely watched practitioner resources in the cloud-native DevOps space.

He is the author of the multi-volume DevOps Toolkit series, Test-Driven Java Development, and DevOps Paradox.

What distinguishes Farcic's thought leadership is his impartial, hands-on approach: he works with tools in practice before writing or speaking about them, and he is willing to reach conclusions that challenge popular assumptions. His KubeCon EU 2026 commentary on the commoditisation of Kubernetes, arguing that the platform's maturity is the point rather than a problem, illustrates his ongoing relevance to the field's leading edge.

16. Mirco Hering

Mirco Hering is the Managing Director leading Accenture's global DevOps practice and Agile practice in Asia Pacific, based in Melbourne, Australia. His 2018 book DevOps for the Modern Enterprise, winner of the DevOps Dozen Best DevOps Book award, is one of the most practical guides available for large organisations transforming legacy IT systems and cultures.

His LinkedIn content in early 2026 includes a substantial Trend Report on Platform Engineering and DevOps, and he speaks regularly at international conferences on the human and organisational dimensions of DevOps transformation.

Hering's contribution is a practitioner's realism about the specific challenges of legacy enterprise environments: the cultural inertia, the contract structures, the governance requirements, and the political dynamics that make DevOps adoption in large organisations a fundamentally different problem from adoption in a digital-native startup.

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Category 5: Kubernetes, Cloud Native, and Infrastructure as Code

The cloud-native ecosystem, centred on Kubernetes, containers, and the CNCF's portfolio, is the technical infrastructure on which modern DevOps practice is built. The people in this category have been at the forefront of building, explaining, and advancing those technologies.

17. Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower is one of the most respected voices in the Kubernetes and cloud-native community globally, a former Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud who retired in June 2023 after a career that included foundational contributions to Kubernetes evangelism, the CNCF governance structure, and the developer community. He is the co-author of Kubernetes: Up and Running, written with Brendan Burns and Joe Beda, and continues to speak at leading conferences, including KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam.

His statement at that event that "everyone is a junior engineer when it comes to AI" captured the honest uncertainty that the most thoughtful voices in the field are willing to express.

Since his retirement from Google, Hightower has continued to contribute as a non-executive director and advisor, and his influence on the cloud-native community remains substantial. His career embodies the DevOps ideal of bringing empathy, craft, and genuine curiosity to technology practice.

In the Pragmatic Engineer podcast released in June 2026, he reflected on three decades in the industry and the lessons he drew from the Kubernetes era.

18. Andrew Clay Shafer

Andrew Clay Shafer is one of the original co-founders of DevOpsDays and a practitioner whose early talks and writings helped define what DevOps actually meant in practice. His 2008 presentation on agile infrastructure at Agile 2008, and his subsequent collaboration with Patrick Debois and others in founding the DevOpsDays movement, place him at the centre of the movement's origin story.

He has worked at organisations including Google and Pivotal, and his conference talks remain among the most intellectually honest explorations of the cultural and organisational dimensions of DevOps.

His contribution to the ongoing conversation is a willingness to challenge comfortable narratives: to ask whether the tooling is actually achieving the cultural change the movement promised, and to hold the community to its own best ideals. In a field that sometimes loses itself in tool proliferation and buzzword cycles, his voice represents a grounding in the original human and organisational intent of the movement.

19. Anton Babenko

Anton Babenko is the creator and maintainer of the AWS Terraform modules repository, one of the most widely used open-source infrastructure-as-code resources in the world, and a prolific contributor to the Terraform and AWS communities. Working as an independent consultant and AWS Community Hero, he has built a substantial following across LinkedIn and GitHub, where his infrastructure-as-code projects have been adopted by thousands of engineering teams globally.

His contribution to DevOps thought leadership is firmly practical: he builds and maintains the open-source infrastructure that makes cloud-native automation accessible to engineering teams that lack the resources to build everything from scratch. His work on Terraform modules, AWS best practices, and infrastructure governance directly supports the platform engineering teams at the heart of modern DevOps practice in 2026.

20. Nana Janashia

Nana Janashia, known through her platform Techworld with Nana, has built one of the most popular DevOps education channels in the world, offering bootcamps, tutorials, eBooks, and structured courses on Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, and cloud-native tooling. Her accessible teaching style and comprehensive coverage of the DevOps toolchain have made her content a primary learning resource for engineers at every stage of their DevOps journey.

Her YouTube channel and bootcamp platform have reached hundreds of thousands of learners globally.

Her contribution to the DevOps ecosystem is educational accessibility: she has made cloud-native and DevOps skills genuinely learnable for a global audience that may not have access to formal education programmes or expensive enterprise training. In a field where knowledge is often gatekept in conference proceedings and expensive certifications, her commitment to open, high-quality free education has broadened the DevOps practitioner community considerably.

Category 6: The Culture and Humans of DevOps

DevOps is fundamentally a culture change before it is a tool selection. The people in this category have built the frameworks, the research, and the communities that centre the human dimensions of software delivery: psychological safety, skills development, team wellbeing, and the people-side of organisational transformation.

21. Jayne Groll

Jayne Groll is the co-founder and CEO of the DevOps Institute, the organisation she has led since 2015 with a focus on advancing the human elements of DevOps success through education, certification, and community. She is the author of the Agile Service Management Guide and the originator of the Humans of DevOps framework, which centres the skills, knowledge, and learning capacities of people rather than tools or processes.

Under her leadership, the DevOps Institute has become one of the most important ongoing research and certification bodies in the field.

Her intellectual contribution is the argument that DevOps adoption ultimately depends on the human capacity to learn, adapt, and collaborate. She has consistently argued that investing in people's skills and growth is the highest-leverage action any organisation can take in its DevOps journey, and she has backed that argument with rigorous upskilling research.

22. Helen Beal

Helen Beal is the CEO and Chair of the Value Stream Management Consortium and a prolific writer, speaker, and strategic advisor on DevOps and value stream management. Based in the UK, she is one of the most active international voices in the field, and her work connects the practices of DevOps delivery to the broader management discipline of value stream management.

Her LinkedIn content in early 2026 includes active posts on the relationship between DevOps and platform engineering.

Beal's contribution is the elevation of value stream thinking as the complement to DevOps tooling: the argument that organisations cannot fully realise the benefits of CI/CD, automation, and platform engineering unless they also understand the flow of work at the organisational level and identify the bottlenecks and handoffs that prevent value from reaching customers.

23. Bridget Kromhout

Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Cloud Advocate at Microsoft and the co-host of Arrested DevOps, one of the longest-running and most respected podcasts in the DevOps community. She served as the co-chair of the DevOpsDays global organisation alongside Matty Stratton, bringing her technical depth and inclusive community instincts to one of DevOps's most important community infrastructure roles.

Her advocacy at Microsoft spans cloud-native, Kubernetes, and the cultural conditions that support effective DevOps practice.

Her contribution is both practical and relational: she has consistently worked to make the DevOps community more welcoming, more diverse, and more substantive in its conversation about what good software delivery looks like. The Arrested DevOps podcast, which she co-hosted, features hundreds of conversations with practitioners and researchers that represent one of the richest archives of DevOps thinking available anywhere.

24. Alan Shimel

Alan Shimel is the founder and CEO of Techstrong Group, the media company behind DevOps.com, Container Journal, and Security Boulevard, and one of the most connected community builders in the DevOps ecosystem. Through DevOps.com, Shimel has for over a decade published a continuous stream of practitioner content, opinion, research, and news that has shaped how the DevOps community stays informed and connected.

His network of writers, analysts, and practitioners spans the globe.

His contribution to DevOps is primarily one of community infrastructure: he has built and maintained the media platforms that allow the conversation to continue, grow, and remain connected to practice rather than drifting into pure vendor marketing. In 2026, Techstrong Group's portfolio of events, content, and community platforms continues to serve as a central hub for the global DevOps community.

25. Garima Bajpai

Garima Bajpai is a DevOps Institute Ambassador based in Canada and the co-author, with Thomas Scheutz, of Strategizing Continuous Delivery in the Cloud, which bridges continuous delivery theory and cloud governance practice. She is a regular speaker on topics including cloud-native delivery, governance, and the intersection of security and continuous integration in regulated industries.

Her particular contribution to the DevOps conversation is the governance and compliance angle: the practical work of designing delivery pipelines that are not only fast but also auditable, compliant, and secure by design. As organisations move to cloud-native architectures in highly regulated sectors, her work on building governance into the delivery pipeline rather than bolting it on afterward has growing practical relevance.

Category 7: Platform Security, DevSecOps, and Responsible Delivery

Security is no longer a separate stage that happens after software is delivered. The DevSecOps movement integrates security practices into every stage of the delivery pipeline, and the people in this category have led that integration from both the technical and strategic sides.

26. Cornelia Davis

Cornelia Davis is a cloud-native computing thought leader with deep experience in platform architecture, API design, and the organisational practices that support cloud-native adoption. Her book Cloud Native Patterns, published by Manning, is one of the most thorough guides to the design patterns and principles underlying modern cloud-native applications.

She has held leadership roles at Weaveworks and other cloud-native organisations, and she is a sought-after speaker on GitOps, platform engineering, and the architecture of high-reliability cloud systems.

Her contribution to DevOps thought leadership is an architectural depth that is rare among practitioners who also write and speak accessibly for broad audiences. Her ability to explain the patterns underpinning cloud-native delivery and to connect those patterns to the organisational and team practices that make them work makes her one of the most complete voices in the field.

27. Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and the host of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast and author of the Last Week in AWS newsletter, combining rigorous cloud cost analysis with a distinctive humour that has made his commentary one of the most widely followed in the AWS community. His specific focus on cloud economics, FinOps, and the real-world cost of architectural decisions has become increasingly important as organisations scale their cloud-native systems.

His contribution to the DevOps ecosystem is his consistent insistence on financial accountability as a dimension of delivery quality. In 2026, as AI workloads add significant new costs to cloud infrastructure, his work on cloud cost management, reserved instance optimisation, and architectural decision-making under budget constraints is more relevant than ever.

His newsletter and podcast together reach one of the largest audiences of practising cloud engineers in the world.

28. Rosalind Radcliffe

Rosalind Radcliffe is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and one of the leading voices on DevOps in mainframe and enterprise environments. Her work bridges the most modern DevOps practices and the legacy systems that still run much of the world's critical infrastructure, including banking, insurance, and government operations.

She is the author of Mobile to Mainframe DevOps for Dummies and a prolific speaker and writer on the specific challenges of applying continuous delivery and DevOps practices to mainframe systems.

Her contribution to the DevOps community is the inclusion of a perspective that is too often missing from the mainstream conversation: that DevOps transformation must work in legacy environments, not just in greenfield digital-native organisations. Her work at IBM has produced real advances in mainframe CI/CD tooling that have benefited a large and underserved practitioner community.

Category 8: Emerging Voices and Global Practitioners

DevOps is a global discipline, and some of its most valuable voices are those actively practising at scale, contributing to communities across multiple continents, and bringing regional perspectives that enrich the overall conversation. The people in this category are building the next generation of DevOps thought leadership.

29. Darin Pope

Darin Pope is the co-host of the DevOps Paradox podcast alongside Viktor Farcic and a practitioner-educator whose work spans CI/CD, platform engineering, and the cultural dimensions of DevOps transformation. His podcast, consistently cited among the best DevOps podcasts globally, features substantive conversations on automation, platform engineering, and the challenges practitioners face in real organisations.

Pope brings a practitioner's directness to the conversation and a particular strength in making complex technical and cultural ideas accessible.

His contribution to the DevOps practitioner community is the DevOps Paradox podcast itself, which after several hundred episodes remains one of the most substantive and consistently high-quality audio resources in the field. His willingness to sit with complexity and resist pat answers reflects the intellectual honesty that the best DevOps thought leadership requires.

30. Emily Freeman

Emily Freeman is the Head of Community at AWS and the author of DevOps for Dummies, one of the most widely read introductory books on the discipline. Previously serving as Chief of Staff for Cloud Advocacy at Microsoft, she brings a combination of strategic communication, community building, and technical understanding to the DevOps conversation.

Her writing and speaking consistently centre the human and organisational dimensions of DevOps over the tooling, making her content accessible to a broad audience of engineering leaders.

Her contribution is the democratisation of DevOps knowledge: her book has reached a large audience of engineers and managers who might have been put off by more technically dense introductory texts, and her community work at AWS continues to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners joining the DevOps conversation.

31. Matty Stratton

Matty Stratton is a Staff Developer Advocate at PagerDuty and the co-chair of the DevOpsDays global organisation, one of the community infrastructure roles that makes the global DevOpsDays conference series possible. He is the co-host, with Bridget Kromhout, of the Arrested DevOps podcast, and a prolific speaker at DevOps, SRE, and cloud-native conferences globally.

His particular focus is incident management, post-incident review, and the culture of learning from failure.

His contribution to the DevOps community is the maintenance and growth of the DevOpsDays conference infrastructure, which has served as the primary grassroots gathering space for DevOps practitioners since the movement began. His work on incident management and learning from failure connects to some of the deepest themes in the field: that high performance requires not just fast delivery but an organisational culture that learns continuously from what goes wrong.

32. Liz Rice

Liz Rice is a former Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent and one of the most respected voices in the cloud-native security and eBPF communities. She is the author of Container Security and Learning eBPF, both published by O'Reilly, and she served as chair of the Technical Oversight Committee of the CNCF.

Her technical contributions to the Kubernetes and cloud-native security ecosystem span open-source tooling, conference keynotes, and written work that helps practitioners understand the security dimensions of cloud-native infrastructure.

Her contribution to DevOps thought leadership is the security angle: the specific challenge of building secure-by-default infrastructure in cloud-native environments, and the tools and practices that allow DevSecOps teams to move fast without accumulating security debt. Her work on eBPF represents a leading edge of infrastructure security that will shape how DevOps teams approach observability, networking, and security enforcement in the coming years.

33. Gillian Armstrong

Gillian Armstrong is a DevOps Institute Ambassador based in the UK and a practitioner-consultant whose work focuses on value stream management, flow metrics, and the human dimensions of DevOps transformation. She is a regular speaker at DevOps Institute events and a contributor to the community conversations around upskilling, flow, and the measurement of DevOps maturity.

Her practitioner-level focus and commitment to making DevOps transformation practical rather than theoretical give her writing and speaking an immediacy that resonates with engineering managers.

Her contribution is the consistent elevation of flow metrics and value stream thinking as the practical lens for organisations trying to understand where they are losing speed and quality in their delivery pipelines. Her work helps bridge the gap between the aspirational frameworks of DevOps and the daily realities of transformation inside complex organisations.

34. Pawel Piwosz

Pawel Piwosz is a DevOps Institute Ambassador and a practitioner based in Poland who contributes actively to the European DevOps community through speaking, writing, and community events. His work focuses on CI/CD practices, automation, and the cultural dimensions of DevOps adoption in Eastern European technology organisations.

As a contributor to the DevOps Institute's Humans of DevOps community, he brings a regional perspective that is underrepresented in the predominantly English-language DevOps conversation.

His contribution is the embodiment of the DevOps Institute's global community mission: he demonstrates that DevOps thought leadership is not confined to San Francisco or London, and his active work in the Polish and broader Eastern European tech community helps spread evidence-based DevOps practices into regions where the conversation has historically had less institutional support.

35. Brent Reed

Brent Reed is a DevOps practitioner, author, and community contributor whose work focuses on value stream management, DevSecOps, and the practical implementation of DevOps practices in enterprise environments. He is a co-author of Practical Guide to Value Stream Mapping for Modern Organizations and a regular contributor to the DevOps Institute community.

His practitioner focus and his work on the intersection of DevOps and security make him a valuable voice for engineering managers navigating the combined demands of speed, security, and compliance.

His contribution to the DevOps conversation is the value stream management angle applied to security: the argument that security is not a gate but a flow, and that integrating security into the delivery pipeline is the only sustainable approach to DevSecOps at scale.

36. Kim van Wilgen

Kim van Wilgen is a Dutch practitioner and community builder working in the Netherlands whose contributions to the European DevOps conversation include conference speaking, writing on agile and DevOps culture, and community organising. Based in the Netherlands, she represents the growing strength of the Benelux DevOps community and brings a European practitioner perspective to topics including continuous delivery, agile transformation, and engineering culture.

Her contribution is the localisation of DevOps practice in non-English-speaking European contexts, helping practitioner communities in the Netherlands and surrounding regions access and apply the research and frameworks developed primarily in English-language contexts. Her active participation in European conferences helps ensure the global DevOps conversation remains genuinely global.

37. Eveline Oehrlich

Eveline Oehrlich is the former Chief Research Director at the DevOps Institute, where she led the organisation's annual Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, one of the most widely cited research publications on DevOps skills and talent. Her research has shaped how organisations around the world think about the skills gap in their DevOps transformation programmes and how to design upskilling curricula that address it.

She is a frequent speaker and writer on the intersection of people, skills, and technology transformation.

Her contribution to the DevOps conversation is rigorous, data-driven analysis of the human skills dimension: not just the technical skills needed to implement DevOps tools, but the process, functional, and human skills that the DevOps Institute research has consistently shown to be equally important to delivery performance. Her work has helped make the case for investing in the full range of DevOps capabilities inside organisations.

38. J. Paul Reed

J. Paul Reed is an independent practitioner, researcher, and speaker who has spent years at the intersection of DevOps, resilience engineering, and the psychology of complex systems. His work explores how engineering teams can learn more effectively from incidents, how cognitive biases affect how teams understand system behaviour, and how the concepts of resilience engineering, developed originally in safety-critical industries, apply to software systems.

He co-hosts the podcast DevOps Perspectives and speaks regularly at SREcon, DevOpsDays, and related conferences.

His contribution to the DevOps conversation is the depth of his engagement with the research literature on human factors and complex systems. In a field that sometimes treats incident response as a purely technical problem, Reed's insistence on the cognitive and social dimensions of how engineering teams understand and respond to system failures provides a counterweight that keeps the conversation honest about the limits of automation.

39. Daniella Villalba

Daniella Villalba is a DevOps practitioner and community contributor who has been building the DevOps community in Latin America through DevOpsDays events, speaking, and writing. She represents the growing practitioner community in South America, where DevOps adoption has accelerated substantially in the past several years across financial services, technology, and enterprise organisations.

Her work helps make the global DevOps conversation relevant and accessible to practitioners in Spanish-speaking markets.

Her contribution is the active development of DevOps community infrastructure in Latin America: organising events, translating and contextualising global frameworks for local practitioner realities, and connecting South American practitioners to the global conversation in ways that have historically been harder to achieve without English-language fluency.

40. Priyanka Vergadia

Priyanka Vergadia is a developer advocate and content creator known as The Cloud Girl, whose visual, accessible approach to explaining cloud and DevOps concepts has built a substantial global following. Based in the United States with a background that spans Google Cloud and community education, she creates visual content, sketchnotes, and video explanations of complex cloud-native and DevOps topics that make advanced technical concepts genuinely approachable.

Her content has reached millions of engineers and engineering managers across social media platforms.

Her contribution to DevOps thought leadership is the visual communication format she has pioneered: her sketchnotes on topics including Kubernetes architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native design patterns are some of the most widely shared technical educational content in the cloud space. In a field that can become intimidatingly dense, her ability to render complex ideas visually and clearly helps a new generation of practitioners engage with ideas they might otherwise find inaccessible.

41. Gene Gotimer

Gene Gotimer is a DevOps and continuous delivery practitioner who has contributed to the DevOps community through writing, speaking, and practitioner-level research on CI/CD practices, testing strategy, and the culture of continuous improvement. His work addresses the practical challenges of implementing continuous delivery in enterprise environments, including how to manage test environments, how to automate quality gates, and how to build the organisational buy-in that makes continuous delivery sustainable.

His contribution to the DevOps conversation is a grounded, enterprise-practitioner perspective that resists both the hype of the latest tooling and the cynicism of those who dismiss DevOps as a passing trend. His writing and speaking help engineering managers and practitioners in large organisations find practical paths forward that honour both their technical constraints and their aspiration for better delivery.

42. Orit Golowinski

Orit Golowinski is a DevOps Institute Ambassador and practitioner based in Israel who contributes actively to the Middle Eastern DevOps community through speaking, writing, and community building. Her work on DevSecOps, CI/CD practices, and the intersection of security and continuous delivery brings a regional perspective and a security-focused lens to the global DevOps conversation.

She speaks at international conferences and contributes to DevOps Institute community content.

Her contribution is the active development of DevOps community in the Middle East and her consistent focus on making the security dimensions of DevOps practice concrete and implementable for engineering teams of all sizes. Her work helps demonstrate that DevOps thought leadership is genuinely global in its geographic reach and genuinely multidisciplinary in its intellectual scope.

43. Dheeraj Nayal

Dheeraj Nayal is a DevOps Institute Ambassador and a practitioner-educator contributing to the DevOps community in India through speaking, training, and community building. His work on the human dimensions of DevOps, including the skills gap, the culture change required for successful transformation, and the specific challenges of adopting DevOps practices in large Indian technology organisations, makes him a valuable voice in a country that is one of the largest technology labour markets in the world.

His contribution is the active building of DevOps practitioner community in India: organising events, delivering training, and connecting Indian practitioners to the global DevOps research and frameworks produced primarily in English-speaking Western markets. His work helps ensure that one of the world's most important technology markets benefits from the same evidence-based DevOps thinking that is transforming delivery performance elsewhere.

44. Leonardo Murillo

Leonardo Murillo is a DevOps practitioner and community builder based in Costa Rica whose work spans platform engineering, CI/CD architecture, and the development of the DevOps community in Latin America. As a DevOps Institute Ambassador, he contributes to the global community conversation while also building local practitioner infrastructure in Central America.

His writing and speaking address the practical challenges of implementing cloud-native and DevOps practices in organisations across the region.

His contribution is both technical and geographical: he brings cloud-native and platform engineering expertise to communities in Latin America where that expertise is in short supply, and he helps connect practitioners in Central and South America to the global DevOps conversation in ways that are genuinely two-directional rather than one-way.

45. Lauri Apple

Lauri Apple is a writer, editor, and practitioner who has made significant contributions to the DevOps community through her work at organisations including Zalando, where she developed the ZMON monitoring system and contributed to open-source tooling used by engineering teams globally. Her work on engineering culture, incident response, and the human dimensions of site reliability engineering has appeared in major technology publications and she speaks regularly at SRE and DevOps conferences.

Her contribution to the DevOps conversation is a writer's ear for what matters in the practitioner experience: her ability to communicate the human and cultural dimensions of engineering work with clarity and empathy has helped make the SRE and observability conversation accessible to a wider audience. Her open-source contributions at Zalando helped demonstrate what mature engineering culture looks like in a European technology organisation.

46. Kumar Singirikonda

Kumar Singirikonda is the Director of DevOps Engineering at Toyota, where he has led enterprise-wide DevOps transformation programmes that have applied continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and AIOps practices to one of the world's largest manufacturing enterprises. His work at Toyota demonstrates that DevOps transformation is not limited to technology-native organisations: the same practices that improve delivery performance at software companies can be applied to drive efficiency and quality in large industrial and manufacturing contexts.

His contribution to the DevOps conversation is the enterprise transformation perspective from a non-software-native organisation: his work at Toyota provides evidence that the principles of DevOps, adapted thoughtfully to context, can drive meaningful outcomes in sectors far beyond the digital-native companies that originally developed and popularised the practices.

47. Yitz Schaffer

Yitz Schaffer is a platform engineering practitioner and community contributor whose work focuses on the architecture of internal developer platforms and the organisational dynamics that make platform teams effective. His writing and conference contributions address the specific engineering and governance challenges of building platforms that actually serve the product teams they are designed to support, rather than creating new forms of bureaucracy and dependency.

His contribution to the platform engineering conversation is a practitioner's honesty about where platform engineering initiatives fail: the teams that build platforms product engineers do not actually use, the governance structures that slow delivery rather than enabling it, and the cultural dynamics that prevent platform teams from operating with the customer-focus and product thinking they need to succeed. His critique-from-within perspective helps the field improve rather than merely celebrate itself.

48. Brian Dawson

Brian Dawson is a DevOps practitioner and former developer advocate at CloudBees whose work on continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps culture has been widely shared across the practitioner community. His writing and speaking focus on the practical implementation of CI/CD pipelines in enterprise environments, including how to manage the cultural and organisational resistance that often accompanies technical transformation efforts.

His contribution to the DevOps community is the practitioner-educator voice: his work explains advanced delivery practices at a level of detail that is useful for the engineering managers and senior engineers who are responsible for implementing those practices in their own organisations, bridging the gap between the high-level frameworks of DevOps thought leadership and the day-to-day realities of delivery team work.

49. Sam Newman

Sam Newman is an independent consultant and the author of Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices, two of the most widely read books on microservices architecture and the migration from monolithic systems to distributed architectures. Based in the UK, his writing is recognised across the industry as some of the most practically grounded and intellectually honest guidance available on the architectural patterns that underpin cloud-native and DevOps delivery.

His books are read by engineering teams in organisations at every stage of their cloud-native journey.

His contribution to DevOps thought leadership is the architectural dimension: the specific patterns and anti-patterns that affect how organisations can evolve their systems toward architectures that support continuous delivery, independent deployability, and team autonomy. His honest assessments of where microservices cause more problems than they solve have made his voice particularly valuable in a space prone to architectural fashion rather than architectural rigour.

50. Nicole van der Hoeven

Nicole van der Hoeven is a developer advocate at Grafana Labs and a prolific content creator and educator specialising in performance engineering, observability, and k6, the open-source load testing tool maintained by Grafana. Based in the Netherlands, she produces video content, blog posts, and live streams on performance testing, Grafana, and the broader observability stack that have reached a large and engaged global audience of DevOps practitioners.

She is also the creator of content at the intersection of productivity and technology.

Her contribution to the DevOps ecosystem is the performance and load testing angle: the reminder that fast deployments are only part of the equation, and that ensuring systems perform reliably under real-world load is as important as the speed of the delivery pipeline. Her approachable teaching style and her commitment to open-source tooling make her content a particularly valuable resource for teams building their performance engineering practice from scratch.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several influential voices shaped the DevOps conversation for many years but were not included in this list for reasons of category, focus, or current engagement level. Gene Kim's writing has been influenced by W. Edwards Deming, whose work on quality and learning organisations provides much of the intellectual foundation for DevOps culture. Martin Fowler's earlier work on continuous integration predates the DevOps name but provided much of its technical vocabulary.

The researchers behind the annual DORA reports collectively represent a body of work that has contributed to dozens of entries on this list. The DevOpsDays community organisers who have built and sustained dozens of events globally are the backbone of the practitioner ecosystem that makes thought leadership possible.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing DevOps

The most common implementation error is treating DevOps as a tool selection problem. Organisations spend months evaluating CI/CD platforms, container orchestration systems, and monitoring tools, and then wonder why their delivery performance has not improved. Tools are necessary but not sufficient: the research is consistent that cultural factors, including psychological safety, leadership practices, and cross-functional collaboration, predict delivery performance far more reliably than any specific technology choice.

Gene Kim's work on the Three Ways, Nicole Forsgren's research on generative culture, and Jayne Groll's Humans of DevOps framework all converge on the same point: change the culture first, then the tools will help.

The second common mistake is implementing DevOps as a team rather than as a practice. Many organisations create a "DevOps team" and expect that team to own and operate a CI/CD platform on behalf of all other engineering teams. This recreates exactly the silo it is supposed to dissolve: the DevOps team becomes the new operations department, with all the handoff and blame-shifting that implies.

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais address this directly in Team Topologies, distinguishing between the Platform Team, which builds and maintains the developer platform, and the stream-aligned teams, which use that platform to deliver products.

The third mistake is skipping the measurement foundation. Organisations that adopt DevOps practices without measuring their current baseline cannot know whether they are improving. The DORA four key metrics, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore, provide a framework for establishing that baseline and tracking improvement over time.

Without measurement, DevOps becomes a set of practices adopted on faith, which makes it vulnerable to the first senior leader who asks whether it is actually working.

A fourth mistake is treating psychological safety as a soft concern rather than an engineering constraint. The research is clear: teams that do not feel safe to raise concerns, experiment, or admit failure cannot learn at the rate that high-performing DevOps requires. Nicole Forsgren's research has consistently shown that generative culture is one of the strongest predictors of software delivery performance.

For a facilitated team conversation about how your leadership team can build the culture and practices that support high-performing technology delivery, bring Jonno White in for a keynote or workshop. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation.

Implementation Guide: How to Use This List

The most practical way to use this guide is as a reading and following list, not as an all-at-once curriculum. Start by identifying which of the eight categories most directly relates to the problem your organisation is currently facing. If you are trying to establish measurement discipline for your DevOps practices, start with Nicole Forsgren's Accelerate and the DORA website at dora.dev.

If you are designing a platform engineering function, start with Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. If you are trying to improve production reliability, start with Observability Engineering by Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda. If you are running a legacy enterprise transformation, start with Mirco Hering's DevOps for the Modern Enterprise.

Once you have read one or two foundational books, move to the practitioners' own content on LinkedIn, YouTube, and their personal blogs. Viktor Farcic's DevOps Toolkit YouTube channel provides current, hands-on content on platform engineering tools. Dave Farley's YouTube channel provides continuous delivery education that is unusually rigorous.

Helen Beal's LinkedIn posts provide consistent value stream management thinking applied to current DevOps challenges. Martin Fowler's bliki at martinfowler.com remains one of the richest archives of architectural and delivery practice thinking available.

For organisations looking to build a DevOps culture rather than just implement DevOps tooling, the cultural and human-centred resources are equally important. Jayne Groll's DevOps Institute upskilling research provides data on the skills gap inside most organisations. John Willis's work on Deming and quality science provides the intellectual context for understanding why certain management practices produce better engineering outcomes.

John Allspaw's work on resilience engineering and incident analysis provides a framework for the continuous learning that high-performing DevOps teams depend on.

For leadership teams wanting to build the communication, accountability, and team effectiveness practices that underpin all of the above, engage Jonno White. Whether virtual or face to face, organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more perspectives on the technology leadership voices shaping the industry, read the 35 leading thought leaders in cloud computing on consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is DevOps and why does it matter?

DevOps is the set of practices, cultural norms, and organisational patterns that enable software teams to deliver high-quality software frequently, reliably, and safely. It matters because research from the DORA programme has shown that software delivery performance directly predicts organisational performance, including profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction.

As of June 2026, organisations that have adopted strong DevOps practices consistently outperform their peers on every dimension that matters to business outcomes.

Who founded the DevOps movement?

The DevOps movement does not have a single founder. The name comes from Patrick Debois, who organised the first DevOpsDays event in Ghent, Belgium in 2009. The movement's intellectual foundations were laid by a group of practitioners including John Allspaw, Andrew Clay Shafer, John Willis, and others who were independently discovering that the walls between development and operations teams were causing unnecessary waste and pain.

What is DORA and why is it important?

DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, the research programme co-founded by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim that has produced the most rigorous data on software delivery performance ever collected. DORA is important because it transformed DevOps from a set of beliefs and practices based on practitioner experience into an evidence-based discipline with measurable outcomes.

The four DORA metrics, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to restore service, have become the standard for how technology teams assess and improve their delivery performance.

What is platform engineering and how does it relate to DevOps?

Platform engineering is the discipline of building and maintaining the internal developer platforms, golden paths, and self-service tooling that allow product engineering teams to build and deploy software without managing the underlying infrastructure themselves. It is the organisational evolution that follows initial DevOps adoption, treating the delivery infrastructure as a product maintained by a dedicated team.

The Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais provides the most widely adopted framework for understanding how platform teams should operate.

How should I choose which DevOps thought leaders to follow?

Start with the category in this guide that most closely matches the problem your organisation is currently trying to solve. For measurement discipline, follow Nicole Forsgren. For platform engineering design, follow Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. For observability and reliability, follow Charity Majors and Liz Fong-Jones. For legacy enterprise transformation, follow Mirco Hering and Jayne Groll.

Match your reading and following to your actual challenges rather than trying to follow everyone at once.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people on this list represent the current state of a global intellectual project that has fundamentally changed how software is built and delivered. That project began with a handful of practitioners in a small Belgian conference hall in 2009 and has since produced the research, the frameworks, the tools, and the communities that allow organisations of every kind to build high-performing software delivery practices.

The field is not standing still: the 2025 DORA report's shift in focus to AI-assisted software development signals the next major transformation in how engineering teams work, and the leaders on this list are already at the forefront of that conversation.

What connects all 50 people in this guide is a commitment to evidence, honesty, and the continuous improvement of practice. They have been willing to publish research that challenged comfortable assumptions, to admit publicly when ideas did not work, and to keep refining their frameworks as the field evolved. That intellectual honesty is what makes their work valuable.

For leadership teams navigating all of this change, the leadership dimensions of DevOps adoption are often the hardest part: building psychological safety, having difficult conversations about underperformance, delegating effectively, and maintaining team cohesion during transformation. Jonno White, founder of Clarity Group Global and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), works with technology leadership teams around the world on exactly these challenges. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries.

Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Google/DORA. (2025). State of AI-Assisted Software Development: 2025 DORA Report. dora.dev.

Google. (2025). Platform Engineering Adoption Survey. As cited in industry reports.

Gartner. (2025/2026). Platform Engineering Forecast. As reported in trade press.

Next Read

The DevOps thought leaders in this guide operate at the intersection of culture, architecture, and delivery practice. For a deeper look at the voices shaping technology leadership more broadly, the 35 leading thought leaders in IT leadership globally covers the CIO, CTO, and technology strategy conversation. Here is the opening: "IT leadership is no longer a back-office function. The Chief Information Officer of 2026 is as likely to be presenting to the board on AI strategy as on infrastructure reliability, and the technology leadership team has become one of the most consequential groups inside any large organisation."

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-it-leadership