About Chris

Chris Baumbauer graduated from Purdue University and has been in the business since the .com bubble popped in the early 2000's. His unofficial title is "not the janitor," but means he's done a little bit of everything from infrastructure/operations to websites and everything in between. While he started in the high performance computing space and grid computing, he worked as a sustaining engineer at Sun Microsystems and then Oracle on the Solaris operating system. The sustaining engineer role helped crystallize his problem-solving abilities when it comes to solving real world customer problems in an environment where "all of the easy problems had been solved long ago."

After Oracle, Chris wanted to get closer to the customers and clients that would feel the most direct impact when the tech would go sideways. This resulted in him starting life as a freelancer working for some large established organizations such as Pacific Gas and Electric to small startups such as Gitlab.

Chris has contributed to open-source projects through the CNCF such as Debezium, Tekton, Kcompose, Knative as well as given talks through the CNCF and Google Cloud Next.

In Chris's spare time, you can catch him on his sax, or flying in the skies.