Kern Walster
Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Greater Seattle Area United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKern Walster is a Senior Software Engineer with 11 years of experience building cloud-native and distributed systems, currently at Docker after four years at AWS. He specializes in back-end and DevOps work, with hands-on expertise integrating container runtimes and microVMs—evidenced by substantial contributions to the firecracker-containerd project that bridge containerd with Firecracker microVMs. Kern has shipped production infrastructure and feature work across large-scale teams, tackling proto/service changes, integration tests, and snapshotter improvements. His background spans startups and cloud titans, from Alarm.com to AWS, reflecting a balance of velocity and operational rigor. Based in the Greater Seattle Area, he pairs a Computer Science degree from the University of Minnesota with pragmatic engineering focused on reliable, testable systems. Notably, he often works at the intersection of containerization and lightweight virtualization, a niche that enhances security and efficiency for multi-tenant workloads.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Github Skills (11)
firecracker10
containerd10
go10
virtualization10
protobuffer9
dockers9
protobuf9
devops9
docker9
aws8
cicd7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
firecracker-microvm/firecracker-containerd
Aug 2021 - Aug 2022
firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:91 reviews, 34 commits, 35 PRs in 11 months
Contributions summary:Kern contributed significantly to the firecracker-containerd project, primarily focused on enhancements and fixes related to the integration of containerd with Firecracker microVMs. Their work involved updating configuration versions, adding features for launching containers with VM-local rootfs, and incorporating VSockPath into the GetVMInfoResponse. They also addressed issues in the demux snapshotter and added support for stargz remote snapshotter functionality. The user's work included modifications to proto files, service implementations, and integration tests, demonstrating their involvement across different project areas.
containerscontainerdfirecrackerfirecracker-microvmsmicrovms
awslabs/soci-snapshotter
Aug 2022 - Jan 2023
A containerd snapshotter plugin which enables standard OCI images to be lazily loaded without requiring a build-time conversion step.
Contributions:2 releases, 766 reviews, 27 commits in 5 months
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