Mark T. Voelker is the OpenStack Architect at VMware, but generally prefers to think of himself as a breadth-first technologist with a flair for distributed systems. Prior to joining VMware, Mark spent 11+ years at Cisco Systems, most recently with the Cloud and Virtualization Group/Office of the Cloud CTO. In past lives he has worked as a software engineer and engineering manager designing web applications, automation systems, mobile apps, traffic generators, distributed systems, and more weasely hacks than he can shake a stick at. He also helps design and support the infrastructure running the software he develops, including award-winning SANs, LANs, load balancing, monitoring, hypervisors, and servers. Mark’s interests include massively scalable data center architecture, Big Data, cloud computing, software defined networking, and distributed systems with a heavy emphasis on OpenStack.
A developer by training, Mark has been enamoured of Open Source since approximately his first exposure to the Internet.  He has helped deploy OpenStack for many customer use cases including general-purpose compute/storage, IP video, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), digital advertising, and more. He is currently a member of the OpenStack DefCore Committee working to drive greater interoperability between OpenStack Powered clouds. He is a former core developer of the puppet-openstack project, and has generally been involved in the OpenStack community since 2011. In 2013, Mark co-founded the Triangle OpenStack Meetup and grew it’s membership to 270 members in it’s first nine months of existence and around 700 members today. He has a two-digit OpenStack Foundation membership profile number and a large enough collection of OpenStack Summit t-shirts that he rarely has to do laundry. Mark apparently has a penchant for programming languages that start with “P” and has prospered for parts of the past decade penning primarily Python, Perl, and Puppet. 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 donuts. When not holed up within the trail-photo covered walls of his home office near Research Triangle Park, NC, Mark is probably on a plane to an OpenStack-related function. He can be also found hiking, camping, backpacking, or making sawdust with extreme prejudice.