Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Paul Brebner is an Open Source Technology Evangelist at NetApp Instaclustr, specializing in Apache Kafka and streaming and integration use cases. Over the past eight years, he has authored 130+ technical articles and presented at numerous international industry and community conferences (including keynotes), addressing complex open source challenges with over 30 different technologies. Paul brings extensive R&D, consulting and speaking experience in distributed systems, software architecture and engineering, performance and scalability, grid and cloud computing, data analytics, and machine learning. Paul previously worked for Waikato University (NZ), the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), several startups (including founder/CTO), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia), University College London (UCL, UK), and National ICT Australia (NICTA, Australia’s ICT Research Centre of Excellence). Paul was a member of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), and has spoken at and served on the Programme Committees of numerous academic conferences. He is the recipient of several awards including an Australian Innovation Patent, ACT iAwards (New Product Category), Australian Computer Society (ACS) Innovation Award, NICTA Impact Award (A. Richard Newton Excellence in Wealth Creation), NICTA Software and Systems Research Group Impact Award, and Australian Academy of Science/French Embassy Award. Since learning to programme on a VAX 11/780 a long time ago, has used many programming languages and tools from Prolog to Java, and still uses the Eclipse IDE. He holds a BSc (double majors in Computer Science and Philosophy) and an MSc with first-class honours in Machine Learning from Waikato University, New Zealand. Paul is the founder of the Performance Engineering track at the Community over Code conference and is a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation. In his spare time, he enjoys model railroads, travelling, photography, kayaking and cycling.
Open Source Technology and DevRel Evangelist - I write technical blogs and talk about Big Data Open Source Technologies
Track chair for the Community over Code Conference (previously ApacheCon) Performance Engineering Track starting with the inaugural event in New Orleans in 2022. Since then, it has been run in Beijing 2023, Halifax 2023, Bratislava 2024, China 2024, and Denver 2024.
Member of the Apache Software Foundation (from 25 March 2025). Prior to joining Instaclustr I've been involved in many open-source activities including: My MSc Thesis Software was Open-Sourced ("Paradigm-directed Computer Learning, Waikato, 1985). Developed Open-Source Soil Hydraulic Software (CSIRO, 1998-2000) Published Open-Source ECPerf kit for JBoss Application Server (CSIRO, 2002) Published Open-Source version of StockOnline J2EE benchmark (CSIRO, 2003) Australian Academy of Science/French Embassy international fellowship grant for performance evaluation of novel open-source middleware architectures (CSIRO, INRIA, ObjectWeb, 2003) Visiting Fellow managing the OGSA (Open-Source Grid) testbed project (UCL, 2004). Contributed code back into the Globus project and published multiple papers. Open-source OGC Sensor services evaluation, outputs included reports, publications and new open-source software for visualization of real-time data (CSIRO, 2005-2006) Provided Performance Engineering and Architecture consulting services to many Australian Government departments and Enterprises, which included many open-source technologies in their stacks (NICTA/Performance Assurance Pty Ltd 2007-2017). An Introduction to Programming in the Processing Language, 13-week High School level open-source material (2015).
Extensive professional experience contributing to 30+ international conferences, workshops and standards bodies, as a member of technical program committees and chair etc since 2002. E.g. Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (2002-2003, spec.org) & SPEC Research Group (2011-2013, research.spec.org), WICSA BoF session chair (2009), International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2012, 2013), International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2020). Invited reviewer for numerous international computer science journals and international scientific funding bodies, E.g. IBM Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions of S/W Engineering, VLDB Journal, French National Research Agency, Dutch Software Engineering grants program. Track chair Community Over Code (Apache) Performance Engineering Track Chair 2022-present. I've been an invited judge for innovation events including the World Festival Innovation Awards (Dev Innovation category) 2021, and several open source "hackathons" (e.g. Canberra Innovation Network Open Source Hack 2021).
I've presented talks (refereed, invited and keynotes) at 50+ academic, industry, community and developer conferences. Topics included software performance, cloud computing, grid and distributed computing, enterprise Java performance, software engineering and architecture, and open source software. For example: All Things Open (2021-present) Open Source 101 (2022) DataEngBytes 2023 APIDays 2022-present Postgresql Asia 2021 Percona 2021 FOSSASIA 2021-present Community Over Code (Apache) 2019-present (NA, Asia, EU) Canberra Big Data Meetup, 2019 International Conference on Performance Engineering, Delft, Netherlands, 2016 (x2) Conference on Quality of Software Architectures, Bertinoro, Italy, 2012. Asian World Security Summit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 2012. International Conference on Performance Engineering, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 2012 (x2) International Conference on Performance Engineering, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2011. Digital Information Management Summit, Sydney, 2011. International Conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization, Singapore, 2010. Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, Patras, Greece, 2009. International Conference on Software Architecture, Cambridge, UK, 2009. International Conference on Software Engineering, Leipzig, Germany, 2008. Australian Software Engineering Conference, Perth, Australia, 2008. Australasian World Wide Web Conference, Noosa, Australia, 2006. International Component Deployment Conference, Grenoble, France, 2005. International Parallel and Distributed Processing Conference, Nice, France, 2003. Annual Borland Conference Asia Pacific, Sydney, 2002. Enterprise Application Summit, Sydney, 2002. International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms, Heidelberg, Germany, 2001. International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Practice, Dunedin, NZ, 1998.
I'm excited to be the Instaclustr Technology Evangelist. I'll be focussing on developing and blogging about example applications for the Instaclustr managed Open Source services, including Apache Cassandra, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch and Redis. In 2018 I designed and built an Apache Kafka IoT application called Kongo. The 2019 project was an Anomaly Detection application using Apache Cassandra, Kafka and Kubernetes. The 2020 project is a globally distributed low-latency stock broker application. Since starting with Instaclustr I've written a blog every few weeks, the equivalent of a few books. The "2001" themed Cassandra/Spark series was 300+ pages (50,000 words); the Kafka (Kafka introductions, and Kafka Kongo IoT) series were 300+ pages (40,000 words); and the Anomaly Detector blog series was even bigger. There's more to the Blogs than just writing them. Each new series requires research to come up with an idea and an overall project plan (each series typically takes 6 months), then I alternate research for each sub-topic, development, testing, producing results, while documenting everything, and then finally the actual Blog post, which takes up to a week to write, illustrate (often needing new diagrams to be created), review, edit, and finally usher through the publishing process, and present talks and interviews, etc. And then repeat.