Brad Davidson is a Staff Software Engineer in Portland with 13 years building and maintaining cloud-native infrastructure, currently focused on K3s and RKE2 at SUSE/Rancher. He combines deep backend and DevOps experience—contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Ansible and the K3s/kiné stack—with practical security and automation know-how honed at Cambia. His work on kine’s SQL compaction, E2E CI tests, and RKE2 CIS/profile integrations shows a knack for improving performance, reliability, and compliance in distributed systems. Comfortable across databases, Kubernetes control planes, and systems engineering, he brings a pragmatic operator’s perspective to developer-focused projects. Outside of code he rides bikes and tinker-makes things, reflecting a hands-on curiosity that informs both tooling and troubleshooting.
Run Kubernetes on MySQL, Postgres, sqlite, dqlite, not etcd.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & DevOps Engineer
Contributions:48 releases, 244 reviews, 31 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brad Davidson primarily focused on enhancing the kine project, which provides a Kubernetes storage backend. His contributions include implementing single-transaction native SQL compaction for improved performance and reliability, fixing compilation errors, and adding E2E CI tests to the build and test pipeline, ensuring code quality and automated testing. He also addressed critical issues by ensuring compaction runs during startup and implemented database size reporting for apiserver etcd metrics, improving the project's maintainability and feature set. Moreover, he bumped library versions and updated etcd and module versions.
Contributions:36 releases, 2246 reviews, 470 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily worked on updating and maintaining the RKE2 project, specifically focusing on integrating and updating K3s versions. Their contributions included modifying configuration files, adding support for new features like system-default-registry, and enhancing the system's security by implementing CIS profiles and fixing related validation issues. Furthermore, the user was involved in adding and modifying components of the underlying infrastructure, such as adding support for disabling components, and integrating with external cloud providers.
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