DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering Expert; Co-Founder of Adaptive Capacity Labs; Former CTO at Etsy; Author of "The Art of Capacity Planning"
John Allspaw Biography
John Allspaw is recognized for his contributions to DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE). He has worked in software systems engineering and operations across diverse sectors, including biotechnology, government, online media, social networking, and e-commerce. Allspaw began his career running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government before transitioning to web technologies, where he built technical infrastructures at Salon, InfoWorld, Friendster, and Flickr. He later held leadership roles as senior vice president of infrastructure and operations and chief technology officer at Etsy.
Allspaw's Velocity conference talk with Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation," is widely cited as a catalyst for the DevOps movement. He contributed to the industry's understanding of complex system failures and emphasized that human operators are integral to reliability work. Allspaw's approach helped expand the definition of operational excellence to include socio-technical resilience, moving beyond a narrow focus on uptime and automation. His publications include the books "The Art of Capacity Planning" and "Web Operations," as well as the foreword to "The DevOps Handbook."
Allspaw introduced the practice of blameless postmortems for technology teams, advocating for a culture that learns from incidents without assigning blame. He outlined this philosophy in a notable blog post while at Etsy, drawing on research into post-incident analysis. After Allspaw published "Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture" on Etsy's engineering blog, the practice was formalized by Google's SRE team and adopted across the technology industry.
Alongside Richard Cook and David Woods, Allspaw co-founded Adaptive Capacity Labs, a consultancy focused on resilience engineering for modern software organizations. He works with organizations to improve incident management and foster learning from operational events. Allspaw holds a Master of Science in human factors and systems safety from Lund University, reflecting his expertise in cognitive systems engineering and his commitment to advancing reliability and resilience in software engineering.
John Allspaw Videos
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John Allspaw is a keynote speaker and industry expert whose speaking topics include Author, Computer Science, Disruptive Thinking, E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Executive Leadership, Futurism, Leadership, Research & Exploration, Technology, Thought Leadership -
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John Allspaw is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics. The estimated speaking fee range to book John Allspaw for your event is available upon request. John Allspaw generally travels from Brooklyn, NY, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are François Chollet, Sanjit Biswas, Punit Soni, John McMahon and Cameron Adams. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling John Allspaw for an upcoming live or virtual event.
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