Bio

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate. In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities. He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several cloud-native and AI open source technologies including Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, PyTorch, KubeFlow, and KServe/ModelMesh. In addition to leading a large team, Brad has personally served as an OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Operator SDK contributor, and is a Kubernetes Documentation Maintainer. As IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate, Brad leads IBM’s Developer Advocacy Initiatives including collateral development, client workshops, presence at conferences and meetups. In addition, Brad has responsibility creating metrics for measuring the efficacy and impact of developer advocates and ensuring that developer advocacy objectives are aligned with IBM Sales goals. He also provides guidance to IBM Clients on the value of open source, inner source, and Open Source Project Office (OSPO) creation. Brad is a frequent keynote and conference presenter and has presented at conferences such as KubeCon, All Things Open, OSCON, and IBM Developer on topics such as Kubernetes Fundamentals and Continuous Delivery, Kubernetes Operator Framework, Kubernetes 12 Factor for Enterprise Apps, Kube SIG IBM Cloud, Kube SIG Docs, IBM Call For Code, and OpenStack Interoperability. He is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018 which focuses on the creation of enterprise quality Kubernetes applications in private and public cloud environments. He is also a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes-- Delivering Highly Available Applications and Services, A book published by O'Reilly Media in June 2021. This latest book covers advanced topics of Kubernetes and OpenShift, including capacity planning, scheduling, DevOps and continuous delivery, high availability, hybrid cloud, and multi-cluster provisioning. Previously, Brad was a member of the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, an OpenStack core contributor and was the project lead for the OpenStack Interoperability Challenge effort. He is a co-author of Identity, Authentication & Access Management in OpenStack, a book published by O'Reilly Media in 2015.