Brian Aker

Who is Brian Aker?

Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker was Director of Architecture at MySQL AB until it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He led Sun's web scaling research group, where he worked on the Drizzle database project. He later became a Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems. He left Sun Microsystems after Oracle acquired it. After leaving Sun Microsystems he became the CTO of Data Differential and provided support to open source projects such as libmemcached, Gearman and the Drizzle database project. Aker is currently a Fellow and VP at Hewlett-Packard, focusing on OpenStack and Cloud Computing.

After graduating with triple majors in environmental science, computing and mathematics, from Antioch College, Aker contributed to his first open source project, the 386BSD operating system. He then moved to work on Slashdot, where his initial task was to rewrite the database back-end to use Oracle. However, he extended the system to ensure it allowed multiple database back-ends, and became a published author along the way, writing Running Weblogs with Slash with chromatic and Dave Krieger. From 2001 to 2007 he posted stories on Slashdot under the Author name of "Krow".