Hands-On Kubernetes Optimization Workshop Series

Patrick is a Senior Solution Architect at StormForge. He is a seasoned system architect who earned his spurs in several adventures at Red Hat, Verizon, and Deloitte over the past two decades. For the past 6 years he deepened his understanding in Kubernetes with different K8s engines. When he is not helping others build their cloud-native apps, you will find him building furniture in his woodshop, roasting coffee beans from different parts of the world, or training with other taekwondo blackbelts at his local dojang.

Niels Roetert is a Solutions Architect at StormForge. During his 30+ year career in IT he has worked as a UNIX administrator, systems engineer, sales engineer and director of sales engineering at various companies including EMC, Tintri and Cloudian. Niels began his career with a focus on big iron running UNIX, then later dove into Linux, and is now immersed in the world of Kubernetes and microservices. Niels has a great deal of technical experience, but he still loves learning new things, and especially enjoys collaborating with peers and customers. Outside of business hours, he likes to play a match of rugby, go for a run or read a book.

Brian Likosar (“liko” pronounced lick-OH, preferred pronouns he/him) is an open source geek with a passion for working at the intersection of people and technology. Throughout his career, he’s been involved in open source – whether that was with Linux, Ansible, and OpenShift/Kubernetes while at Red Hat, Apache Kafka while at Confluent, or Apache Flink while at AWS. He’s based in the Chicago area and enjoys horror, sports, live music, and theme parks.