Speaker Details

Mark Voelker is currently a Principal Engineer at Auth0, but generally prefers to think of himself as a breadth-first technologist. In past lives he has worked as a software engineer, engineering manager, and architect designing web applications, automation systems, mobile apps, traffic generators, and more weasely hacks than he can shake a stick at. He also helped design and support the infrastructure supporting his software, including LANs, award-winning SANs, load balancing, and servers. Mark currently works on enterprise cloud architecture, software defined networking, and distributed systems. He’s been enamoured of Open Source approximately since his first exposure to the Internet, helped found Cisco’s Open Source Conference and was part of the OpenStack@Cisco team before joining VMware in 2014 where he leads architecture for the VMware Integrated OpenStack R&D team. Mark has been active in the OpenStack community since 2011 when he attended the Diablo Design Summit and has been an attendee and/or speaker at every Summit since. He is OpenStack Foundation member #54 and owns enough OpenStack t-shirts that he can go long stretches without doing laundry. Mark co-founded the Triangle OpenStack Meetup in Research Triangle Park, NC in 2013 and helped grow the group to 1000+ members. As an application developer and infrastructure afficionado, Mark is concerned with interoperability of cloud platforms and is the co-chair of the Interop Working Group. He is also a former core reviewer on the Puppet OpenStack project and also works in technologies ranging from NFV to Kubernetes. He has a habit of including vacation photos and Douglas Adams quotes in his presentations and his time can generally be bought with a sufficient quantity of doughnuts. When not holed up within the trail-photo covered walls of his workspace at home near Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Mark can be found hiking, camping, backpacking, or making sawdust with extreme prejudice. Mark is a proud alumni of the Park Scholarships at NC State University and currently serves as a Regional Selection Leader for the scholarship. You can also find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, or at his occasional blog.