My Top 5 Women Motivational Speakers in Cloud-Native Development

They are CNCF ambassadors, Docker captains, or AWS heroes. The women in tech are the game-changers of cloud-native development, sharing their knowledge about containers, Kubernetes, Docker, or DevOps topics. They inspire the new generation of girls entering into the STEM universe.

Diversity is crucial in a successful company by bringing different perspectives to solve a problem, understand all customers and overall coming up with the right solutions to challenges.
We find many organizations preaching the importance of having female figures to identify and inspire young girls (meaning less than 18 yo) to venture into tech paths.

I might still be a young girl. Or it may be important, at any age, to have role models. I will flow with the second option.

In this article, I will cover the importance of having inspirational females and reveal my top 5 motivational speakers of the year: the women in cloud.

Why it is important to have role models

Since I was young, I have always had people, alive or dead, inspiring me, to create, to follow a path, or to be a better person.

Today, I want to progress in cloud application development, Golang, and to contribute more to open-source projects.
Naturally, when I look at women in these areas, teaching, sharing their knowledge in every possible form, it makes me realize I want to be one of them.

I have dreams and ambitions.

That’s a great thing to have dreams but making them happen, is a better thing. Here is my strategy.

By observing these women one can identify concrete objectives and break them down into small achievable pieces (SMART method, does it ring a bell ?).

Prepare your learning plan.

Women speakers publish content every day in the form of articles, tutorials, books, videos, podcasts, demos, to mention just a few. You can find a plethora of media to learn from them about their areas of expertise. Of course, women like these possess notable soft skills such as public speaking, writing, and educational talents.

As a matter of fact, these ladies are cloud-native leaders. By showing what they achieve, they motivate me into getting the best out of myself.

Feeling down? Go back to your motivational people list.

After the theory, let’s discover my top 5 female inspirational speakers!

My top 5 of motivational women speakers

Liz Rice

Role: Chief Open Source Officer @Isovalent
Domains: containers, cloud native technologies, security, distributed systems
Favorite content: Containers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018

At the top, she is my favorite — she can stunningly vulgarize technical topics.

Liz Rice is an experienced software engineer in the security and container domains. She is well known for her Containers From Scratch talk.
As an expert in container, kernel and security, she is now the chief open source officer at Isovalent developing eBPF and cilium products.

She is also the chair of Technical Oversight Committee of CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), and an ambassador for OpenUK. Besides, she speaks regularly at famous conferences like KubeCon.

You can find her on Twitter, Github and more on her website.

Aurélie Vache

Role: DevRel @OVHcloud
Domains: DevOps, Cloud, Golang
Favorite content: Understanding Kubernetes in a visual way — 11 — Liveness & Readiness | Kubernetes en français

One of the two French (GDE) Google Developer Experts in Cloud, she turns container theory into simple sketch notes.

Aurélie Vache has a solid experience in software development and ops. She shares her knowledge and best practices, lately through sketch notes and videos.

In addition to being GDE, she is CNCF ambassador, Docker captain and promotes women in tech through Duchess as a leader and EllesBougent organizations.

You can find her on Twitter, Youtube and Dev.to.

Nana Janashia

Role: DevOps trainer
Domains: Any DevOps tools
Favorite content: Kubernetes Operator simply explained in 10 mins

On her youtube channel TechWorld with Nana, she teaches any DevOps topic.

Nana Janashia is a DevOps consultant and trainer. She built her youtube channel to share her expertise and a full bootcamp to become a proper DevOps.

In addition, she is a Docker Captain, an AWS Container Hero and CNCF Ambassador.

You can find her on Twitter, Youtube, and more on her website.

Anaïs Urlichs

Role: SRE @Civo
Domains: Go, Kubernetes, Helm (to mention just a few)
Favorite content: 100 days of Kubernetes

She challenged herself to learn Kubernetes in 100 days and she is the top CNCF ambassador of the year.

Anaïs Urlichs transitioned from marketing to tech. She has been a Developer Evangelist at CodeFresh and wanted to get more into doing the coding stuff. She has a DevOps newsletter and shares her journey on her blog. She decided to learn Kubernetes and cover her journey to help others in the 100 days of Kubernetes.

You can find her on Twitter, Youtube, Github, and more on her website.

Kaslin Fields

Role: Developer Advocate @Google
Domains: Kubernetes, Container
Favorite content: From One to Many: The Road to Multicluster — Containerized Adventures (kaslin.rocks)

You can find her drawing to transform containers into adventures, she advocates for the Kubernetes developers community.

Kaslin Fields has a long list of keynotes at KubeCon. She is advocating for the Kubernetes developers and community at Google. She loves making technology accessible to all.

Her medium is illustration on her comic website.

You can find her on Twitter, Github, and more on her website.

Take-aways

I hope you are convinced (if you were not already) to maintain your motivational women speakers list, keep in mind:

• Have dreams, dare to be ambitious
• Identify objectives
• Keep learning
• When feeling down, go back to your motivational people list
• Be bold

Do you already have a list of people that make you dream ?