John Looney

John Looney graduated from Computer Applications at Dublin City University, and specialized in supporting high-end commercial UNIX environments. He noticed that Irish sysadmin administrators had no formal training opportunities, and set up the Irish Linux User Group to provide a community and monthly free training sessions on the latest open source technologies to over 400 Irish engineers. He ran LinuxWorld Dublin in 2000. While at Hosting365 he built Ireland's largest shared hosting infrastructure for 30,000 customers on a shoestring budget.

Today, he's a Site Reliability Engineer responsible for Google's cluster infrastructure; initially the cluster fabric, GFS and Chubby, and more recently the datacenter automation and remote access technologies. He has built a five-month full-time graduate program to take junior engineers and retrain them to take the pager for Google.com. John is on the Computing Committee for Engineers Ireland.