Gregory Farnum
Software Engineering Manager at IBM
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inInfrastructure and Network Automation
Gregory Farnum is a seasoned software engineering manager with 17 years of experience specializing in distributed systems, storage, and coordination protocols. He has deep, hands-on expertise in Ceph—contributing core monitor election improvements, test infrastructure, and long-term maintenance of messaging and CephFS components—work that spans kernel patches to user-space daemons. A former technologist at Inktank and long-time Red Hat lead now transitioned to IBM with the Red Hat Storage team, he combines individual-contributor depth with team leadership and mentoring. Gregory’s background in Paxos/Zookeeper research informs pragmatic designs that prioritize scalability and stability in production clusters. He’s known for translating subtle distributed-systems failure modes into robust engineering solutions and for cultivating developer knowledge through teaching and community-oriented practices.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science; Government, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science; Government at Harvey Mudd College
Github Skills (19)
filesystem10
c-language10
back-end-development10
nfs10
testing10
storage10
distributed-systems10
ceph10
cprogramming-language10
python9
linux9
distributed-file-system8
automations8
automation8
bash8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
ceph/ceph
Jun 2009 - Sep 2022
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:323 reviews, 3781 commits, 659 PRs in 13 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Gregory focused on improving the monitor election system within the Ceph distributed storage platform. They implemented and refined a connectivity-based election strategy and implemented features to improve its effectiveness in stretch cluster configurations. Their work included modifying and extending the existing ConnectionTracker, writing tests, and refining the election strategy to prevent flapping issues. They also added several admin commands and tools.
fusefile-storagecephstorageopenebs
ceph/teuthology
Sep 2014 - Jan 2020
Ceph test suite
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:37 commits, 29 PRs, 27 pushes in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Gregory primarily focuses on modifying and improving the testing infrastructure related to the Ceph storage project. Their work involves adding more detailed logging to debug NFS client and server issues and ensuring correct unmounting and unexporting of NFS clients and servers. They also improved the installation process by including the libcephfs-jni package in the deb package list and removed an unnecessary import statement, which likely reduced potential linting warnings.
yangtestingcephfilemakersuite
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