The Runbook – Crystal Ball October 2026

Keith Mattix is a software engineering leader who enjoys building scalable, high-impact cloud infrastructure. Known for his work across cloud-native ecosystems, service meshes, and distributed systems, he's led key engineering initiatives at companies like Microsoft and Solo.io. He thrives at the intersection of complex architecture and open-source collaboration, frequently contributing to projects like Istio and agentgateway. Outside of deep technical problem-solving, Keith enjoys mentoring engineers and building strong, inclusive tech communities.

Sarah is a tech evangelist at Buoyant who loves making complex concepts more digestible. She is the self-proclaimed founder of the Leslie Lamport fan club. When she's not writing or streaming, she is running her animal rescue and competing in triathlons. She believes code should be like cats: intelligent, fluffy, and easy to take care of.

Flynn is a tech evangelist at Buoyant, where he works on spreading the good word about Linkerd — the graduated CNCF service mesh that makes the fundamental tools for software security and reliability freely available to every engineer — and about Kubernetes and cloud-native development in general. Flynn is also the original author and a maintainer of the Emissary-ingress API gateway, also a CNCF project. Flynn's career in computing spans nearly forty years and runs the gamut from bringup on bare metal to distributed applications, with a common thread of communications and security throughout. He has spoken about Linkerd, Emissary-ingress, and other cloud native technologies at several conferences, including KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, DevOps Days, and the NYC Kubernetes meetup.