Contributing Writer

Jonah Kowall

Jonah Kowall has spent his career at the intersection of cybersecurity, IT operations, and observability. This journey started in the late '90s when he co-founded one of the first content filtering companies and contributed to the FreeBSD project, including some early wireless cracking algorithms. He spent 15 years in the trenches managing infrastructure, security, and performance engineering at both startups and large enterprises; during that time, he picked up CISSP, CISA, and KCNA certifications while figuring out how to scale and tune complex SaaS applications. In 2011, Jonah moved into the analyst world at Gartner. He led the APM Magic Quadrant and created the one for NPMD. He also coined the term "Network Packet Broker" (NPB) to help define that market. By 2015, he returned to building products. He joined AppDynamics as the VP of Market Development and Insights. In this role, Jonah ran product teams and built extensive technical partnerships; he collaborated closely with internal and external OEMs to create AppDynamics for SAP. He was also heavily involved in the company's IPO preparation and wrote most of the S-1 filing right before the $3.8 billion acquisition by Cisco. Since then, he has led product and engineering teams at Kentik and served as CTO at Logz.io before moving into open-source SaaS data platforms at Aiven. After serving as SVP of Product and Design at Paessler, Jonah recently took on the same role at Spacelift. There, he owns the product direction and strategy across their Deploy, Flows, and Spacelift Intelligence product lines. His product management style is defined by a deep-seated customer obsession and a hands-on approach to solving complex technical problems. Jonah prioritizes direct engagement with users to ensure that product roadmaps are grounded in real-world challenges; he believes that the most successful products are born from a relentless focus on delivering tangible value and seamless user experiences. Open source remains a major focus for him. He is a founding team member and TSC member for OpenSearch, and he serves as a maintainer for Jaeger (the CNCF distributed tracing project). Jonah is driven by a passion for community building and helping others learn; he views open source as the essential foundation that allows companies to own their own destiny. By leveraging open source, companies can build, expand, and uplevel their ability to address their customers while keeping everything strictly customer-focused. Jonah lives in Pompano Beach, Florida. When he is not working, he is usually scuba diving. He enjoys exploring reefs and wrecks around the world and practicing underwater photography. He also provides volunteer IT management for the South Florida Wildlife Center.