Alan Shimel is founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, a Futurum company, and a member of Futurum's executive leadership team. A technology entrepreneur, media executive and industry commentator, Shimel has spent more than three decades building businesses, communities and media platforms serving enterprise technology professionals, including co-founding StillSecure, a network security company, and the DevOps Institute, a DevOps certification and training body. At Techstrong, he leads a portfolio of media brands including DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Techstrong AI, Techstrong IT, Digital CxO, Platform Engineering, Techstrong Semi and Techstrong TV, along with a growing portfolio of events, educational programs and digital communities. With more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, Shimel is a familiar voice in the space and was an early advocate of the DevOps movement, helping bring DevOps practices into mainstream enterprise technology. His work today spans cybersecurity, DevOps, cloud-native technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and digital transformation, and he hosts popular programs including Techstrong Gang, Shimmy Says and Still Cyber, After All These Years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics from St. John's University and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School.
Security Tool Sprawl: The New Breach Vector for Cloud Native
“More is better” has always been a dangerous assumption in tech. In security, it’s downright reckless. Across the cloud-native ecosystem, organizations are drowning in their own defenses: dozens of overlapping tools, agents, ...
eBPF: The Silent Power Behind Cloud Native’s Next Phase
eBPF is quietly reshaping cloud native computing, powering service meshes, observability, networking, and security directly in the Linux kernel. By reducing sidecar overhead, enabling zero-instrumentation telemetry, and enhancing runtime protection, eBPF is ...
Shimmy’s Early Look: Can’t-Miss Sessions at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025
CNCF turns 10 as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 heads to Atlanta this November. With 300+ sessions on Kubernetes, AI, platform engineering, security, and observability, the event showcases the next decade ...
Fitting Square Kubernetes Into the Round AI-Native Apps
Kubernetes tamed cloud-native workloads, but AI-native apps push its limits. Can it evolve for GPU-first, data-intensive AI — or is it time for new control planes? ...
From Observability to Actionability: Why Metrics Alone Aren’t Enough
Observability has plateaued. The next step is actionable observability—using AI, automation, and SLOs to turn telemetry into reliable outcomes ...
Apple Buys Styra Brains, OPA Remains Open
In what may be the most Apple-esque move in recent memory—quiet, strategic, and totally on-brand—the tech giant has apparently executed an “acquihire without the acquisition” by scooping up the co-founders and core ...
The GitOps Plateau – Have We Stopped Innovating?
GitOps adoption is steady but innovation has slowed. AI-native GitOps could be the breakthrough that makes Kubernetes delivery smarter, safer, and scalable ...
GitOps Under Fire: Resilience Lessons from GitProtect’s Mid-Year 2025 Incident Report
GitOps may power cloud-native delivery, but rising outages and breaches across GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Azure DevOps expose just how fragile today’s pipelines really are ...
Kubernetes Has Become Boring — That’s a Good Thing
Nearly 10 years on, Kubernetes has become the invisible backbone of cloud-native infrastructure—stable, trusted and still quietly evolving ...
Service Mesh at a Crossroads: Istio’s Graduation and the Road Ahead
It wasn’t that long ago that service mesh was the shiny new toy of the cloud-native stack. For many platform teams, Istio, Linkerd, Consul Connect, or Kuma promised to solve some of ...
