Donald Eaves

Donald Eaves is a seasoned professional known for creating generalized automation platforms to manage complex distributed systems.

At Broadcom's Security Products division, he developed the Thor platform, which effectively handles over 600 GCP VMs and various clusters for Elasticsearch, Kafka, Ignite, monitoring, Spark/Dataproc, and Kubernetes services.

Eaves addressed the challenges of change management and complexity reduction in distributed systems by introducing Thor Renderman, a Python and Jinja-based framework supporting heterogeneous deployments like Helm, Kubernetes, Terraform, and SaltStack.

He simplified deployment processes by representing entire distributed systems in a single Git repo and automating releases against different environments, boosting efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Eaves leveraged Thor's Salt layer to manage VMs efficiently, enabling direct updates at the VM layer for streamlined change management.

His approach of integrating open source components in Thor led to a significant reduction in system complexity, enhancing agility and control, particularly in data clusters where the platform's capabilities surpassed traditional solutions like Kubernetes.

Eaves holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Connecticut, and pursued Non-Degree studies in Business Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.

In his career, Eaves has held prominent roles like Sr. Principal Software Engineer at Broadcom, Sr. Software Engineer/Platform Owner at Dropbox, Senior Data Platform Engineer at Groupon, System Architect Team Lead at AOL, and Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

He also founded companies like Jelly Fields, Hypersight Inc., and played crucial roles in various organizations, showcasing a diverse and rich professional background.