Thomas Graf
Chief Technology Officer, Security Business Unit at Isovalent
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThomas Graf is a veteran technology leader and co-founder-turned-CTO with 26 years of experience building high-performance networking, observability, and security systems for cloud-native environments. As co-founder and long-time CTO of Isovalent and a core driver of the Cilium project, he pioneered eBPF-based networking and security that transparently operates inside the Linux kernel. His career spans deep upstream Linux kernel networking work, Open vSwitch and iproute2 optimizations, and leadership roles at Red Hat and Cisco, blending low-level systems engineering with product and organizational leadership. Known for pragmatic kernel-space innovations—such as skb_zerocopy and Netlink mmap optimizations—he consistently focuses on efficiency, scalability and maintainability. Based in Zurich, he also chaired the eBPF Foundation and continues to shape the ecosystem through both code and governance.
26 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil
English, German
Github Skills (44)
url-routing10
kubernetes10
observability10
system-programming10
ebpf10
ip10
packet10
c1110
microsoft-azure10
linux-kernel10
network-programming10
bpf10
networking10
c1710
cilium10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
tgraf/bmon
Jul 2013 - Feb 2017
bandwidth monitor and rate estimator
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Systems Engineer
Back-end Developer & Systems EngineerContributions:4 releases, 106 commits, 25 PRs in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Thomas's contributions center on enhancing the bmon bandwidth monitoring tool. They implemented features related to module management, including auto-loading and single registration enforcement, indicating a focus on system architecture and maintainability. The user also added options for displaying rates in bits per second, and made changes to the curses output module to improve display and usability. Further commits focused on bug fixes and code improvements, showing proficiency in systems programming and the project's underlying technologies.
monitornetworkingbandwidthnetwork-monitoringbandwidth-monitor
thom311/libnl
Sep 2007 - Aug 2014
Netlink Library Suite
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:326 commits, 2 comments in 7 years
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily contributed to the libnl library, focusing on the improvement of the traffic control and address family APIs. They added and updated features related to VLAN, bonding, and IPv6 address configurations, implementing new functions and correcting existing ones. Moreover, the user provided internal API refactoring, incorporating unit tests and improving the overall quality and readability of the codebase, including extended API documentation.
dotnetnetlinksuite
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