Ambassadors

Danny Abukalam

Danny Abukalam is a senior software engineer in Bloomberg's Technology Infrastructure group, working on the Storage Engineering team to improve the reliability of Bloomberg's Ceph infrastructure. Previously Danny worked at SoftIron, LINBIT, and Codethink primarily focused on open source infrastructure software. In his spare time he manages a non-profit events company involved in supporting a number of open source infrastructure events such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Ceph.

Aji Arya

Aji Arya, hailing from the enchanting land of Borneo, Indonesia, is a dedicated cloud architect based in Indonesia. Specializing in OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph Project Implementation for university, government, and enterprise, he actively engages with the local open-source Indonesia community, sharing his knowledge through his personal blog and speaking at local conferences.

Anthony D'Atri

Anthony D'Atri's career in system administration, ops, and architecture has spanned laptops to vector supercomputers. He brings his passion for effective fleet management and server components to bear on a holistic yet, detailed approach to deployment and operations. Experience with architecture and troubleshooting of other storage technologies dovetailed neatly into Ceph. He has spent seven years managing petabyte scale Ceph object and block services and regularly contributes to the Ceph codebase and documentation.

Cheolho Kang

Cheolho Kang is a software engineer at Samsung Electronics, working on the Storage Software Team to develop Ceph. His work focuses on implementing robust storage solutions for NVMe-oF environments using Ceph. He is also interested in Seastore for the Crimson project and is actively researching fast recovery techniques, such as NVMe-oF recovery, for petabyte-scale JBoF (Just a Bunch of Flash) systems. He holds a Master’s degree from Seoul National University, where he conducted research on next-generation Non-Volatile Memory systems. Specifically, he explored the use of emerging NVM technologies to optimize key-value stores such as RocksDB and Redis. In the Korean Ceph community, he leads a Code Walkthrough Study, helping developers gain deeper insights into Ceph’s codebase.

Deepika Upadhyay

Deepika is currently focused on Rook and Ceph, with experience in RADOS, RBD, and enhancing tracing efforts for Ceph. A strong advocate for open source, she is deeply committed to contributing to the Ceph community and is passionate about helping marginalized groups get started in tech. Outside of work, Deepika enjoys sports, hiking, music, and travel.

Yite Gu

Yite Gu runs the Ceph project at ByteDance, as well as the integration project Rook and Ceph-CSI between Ceph and Kubernetes container orchestration systems. He provides the company with a sustainable iteration and continuous delivery software engineering, and it is in a good cycle. Yite Started working on Ceph related projects in 2019, maintained a passion for open source software to this day. He is passionate about contributing code to rados and bluestone, providing free technical support to other enterprises (more than 10) in China that use Ceph storage.

Hang Geng

Hang Geng is the community manager of CESI (China Electronics Standards Institute) and the most valuable expert of Tencent Cloud. Since 2015, he has been the head of the Ceph Chinese community and has been committed to community development and construction for many years. Currently, he focuses on software-defined storage (SDS) technology, community governance, open source standards, open source education, and open source-related fields, including OpenStack, Ceph, SODA, CHAOSS, etc., and has won multiple open source field contribution awards.

Joachim Kraftmayer

Joachim Kraftmayer is the founder and CEO of CLYSO Inc. based out of Munich Germany with over 30 years of IT, Computer Science and Business experience. CLYSO was founded in 2010 with a focus on promising sustainable cloud solutions with a very strong focus on CEPH since 2012. Under Joachim’s leadership over 350 IT projects have been successfully completed for Fortune 500 to SME companies, government, and NGOs. Joachim hold a Master of Science (Dipl. Ing.) in Computer Science from the Technical University of Applied Sciences (Technische Fachhochschule) in Munich Germany.

Michiel Manten

With over 25 years of IT experience, Michiel Manten has been working with Fairbanks and 42on since 2012, supporting open source teams in high-tech industries from all over the world. Together with Linux, OpenStack and Kubernetes, Ceph is the major focus point of the organizations. Michiel has seen all kinds of Ceph clusters, ranging from terabytes to petabytes, spinning disks or all flash, CephFS, RBD and S3. He was involved with organising parts of the OpenInfra Summit, OpenStack Days, Ceph Days, CloudStack Ceph Days and Cephalocon events and he is always looking forward to keeping Ceph alive and active both in the Benelux region and worldwide.

Etienne Menguy

Etienne Menguy is focusing on Ceph since 2015, interested by automation and scaling he had opportunities to give many talks about those topics. He worked as SRE for a public cloud provider for five years running the block storage infrastructure at large scale and as storage consultant. Currently working as a storage architect at Ubisoft, he promotes open source for internal needs.

Frédéric Nass

Frédéric is an infrastructure engineer in French higher education and research. Originally a civil engineer, he transitioned to IT and has accumulated 20 years of experience specializing in virtualization and storage technologies. He led Kubernetes and DevOps adoption at the University of Lorraine and has been operating Ceph since 2014, managing petabytes of diverse data including scientific datasets, user files, emails, virtual machines and container storage. Frédéric speaks at national and international conferences, like at the Red Hat Summit in 2018. In addition to his main role, Frédéric provides Ceph training to students as a part-time university instructor.

Sina Moghaddas

With over a decade of experience in infrastructure design and management, Sina is a seasoned professional specializing in OpenStack and Ceph. He possesses extensive expertise in designing and implementing robust infrastructure solutions, with a focus on OpenStack cloud environments. With a deep understanding of OpenStack's architecture and services, Sina excels in creating scalable and reliable cloud deployments. Their proficiency in Ceph enables them to design and optimize distributed storage systems. With a track record of over 10 years in infrastructure, Sina brings a wealth of experience in delivering high-performance and resilient solutions.

Alvaro Soto

I was born in a little town in Chile called Linares. I moved to Mexico at 19 years old to start continue my Computer Science Engineering degree (after getting expelled from a university in Chile) and a master's degree in computer science nearly ten years later, mainly because I got bored with people talking about technological concepts without knowing on what nowadays cutting edge platforms are built, and I wanted to work more on research and less explaining.

I've worked as a freelancer, implementation engineer, and support engineer for larger and smaller companies in LATAM: Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico. As a result, today, I dedicate my time to helping companies healthy disengage away from legacy architecture applications and solutions to fully distributed ones with Open Source technologies.

Rachana Patel

I am an open-source enthusiast with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and over a decade of experience in software-defined storage. Since 2016, have been an enthusiastic advocate for Ceph bringing a deep passion for its capabilities and community-driven innovation. Currently a Technical Program Manager at IBM, I lead complex, multi-phase programs with globally distributed teams, focusing on Agile methodologies, release management, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Skilled in process optimization, risk management, technical acumen in automation and performance testing.

Ray Sun

Ray is the CTO of OnePro Cloud, and experienced with a demonstrated history of working in the cloud computing industry especially in OpenStack and cloud migration and DR products. As co-founder of China local Ceph community, Ray aggressively promoted Ceph project and succesfully organized the first Cephalocon APAC in 2018. Also Ray is the Most Valuable Professional of Alibaba Cloud and Tecent Cloud.

Humble Devassy

Humble Devassy Chirammal is a Software Architect in the Storage Engineering team at Red Hat. He has more than 17 years of IT experience, and his area of expertise is in understanding the full stack in an ecosystem, with emphasis on architecting solutions based on demand. These days he primarily concentrates on Ceph and its integration to container orchestrator systems like Kubernetes. He is a maintainer of Ceph drivers in Kubernetes and projects like Ceph CSI driver. He has hands-on experience of emerging technologies, such as IaaS and PaaS solutions in Cloud and Containers. In the past, he has worked on intrusion detection systems, Clustering solutions, and Virtualization. He is an open source advocate and actively organizes meetups on CNCF, Openshift/ Kubernetes, Storage and Virtualization. He is also an author of the book titled "Mastering KVM Virtualization". He was the main co-ordinator behind first Ceph Day India, 2019.

Wendy White

Wendy White began her career as a front-end web developer and multimedia project lead for Scitech, a cutting-edge interactive science museum. This ignited an interest in technical communication, and allowed Wendy to gain valuable insights into making complex concepts accessible to the general public across all forms of media. Wendy went on to craft technical documentation, user manuals, educational videos and training courses for a variety of organisations that required her ability to combine analytical thinking with clear, empathetic communication. Now, Wendy curates and creates technical content around Ceph as part of her role at SoftIron. In her free time, she writes interactive fiction using the open source visual novel engine, Ren’py.