Will Foster is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. He attended The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in 1996, where he pursued a degree in English. Will was a performing member of The Summerall Guards, an elite close-order Prussian drill unit, as well as a cadet officer within Tango Company, class of 2000. He also holds a degree in technical writing from Appalachian State University and is a Red Hat Certified Engineer.
Since 2000, Will has worked as a UNIX/Linux systems administrator involved in mission-critical customer-facing production business environments. A lifelong skateboard enthusiast, he had a brief stint as a snowboarding instructor during the years 2000-2001.
Will has worked at Red Hat since 2007 as a senior systems administrator / DevOps engineer managing enterprise IT storage and core infrastructure. Currently, he works in the OpenStack deployment team. His team designs, architects, and builds labs and infrastructure to test and vet real-world customer deployments and cloud scenarios. They also collaborate with the upstream development community and partners to improve and build upon the OpenStack platform.
Will currently resides in Dublin, Ireland, and in his free time, he performs stand-up comedy, travels, and blogs at http://hobo.house. Will can be found on Twitter as @sadsfae.
Mostafa A. Hamid is an information systems engineer from Potsdam, The State University of New York (SUNY). He has completed certifications such as CISSP, CEH, and LPIC as well as in IBM RUP architecture. Besides these, Mostafa is also certified in JavaScript, PHP, Backbone.js, Java, and XML from Potsdam. He has a bachelor's degree from Modern Academy for Computer Science and Management Technology.
Mostafa has worked with Hilton Worldwide as an internet support engineer, with United Systems as a technical support engineer, and with Media Plans as an IT manager/architect. He has also worked with MOIS as an IT manager/teacher and is currently working as a software developer at Wassaq.
Mostafa has also reviewed OpenStack Essentials, Packt Publishing.
Kevin Jackson is married and has three children. He is an experienced IT professional working with business and enterprises of all sizes at Rackspace as a principal OpenStack engineer. Kevin has been working with OpenStack since early 2011 and has extensive experience of various flavors of Linux, Unix, and hosting environments. Kevin can be found on twitter @itarchitectkev.
Kevin authored the first edition, and coauthored the second and recently published third editions of the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook by Packt Publishing. Kevin also co-authored the OpenStack Foundation's OpenStack Architecture Design Guide during a 5-day book sprint in California.