Michael DeHaan is a 2001 graduate of NC State University Computer Science, who has made a significant professional impact designing systems management technology.Michael created the Cobbler project in 2006 to automate bare-metal (PXE) and virtual machine Linux deployments. Cobbler was used around the globe to manage infrastructure including the top level DNS servers for the public internet, servers underpinning the world’s most popular multiplayer console video games, chip design facilities, major motion picture studio render-farms, Wall Street banks, and more. Around this time, he also helped co-create “Func”, a distributed remote task execution system.In February of 2012, Michael founded the Ansible project, an SSH-based configuration management and datacenter/cloud orchestration system. Ansible grew to become the 5th most contributed to project on GitHub.com in 2013, sharing billing with projects such as Ruby on Rails, Homebrew, and Angular.js. In 2014, OpenSource.com named Ansible one of its top 10 open source projects, along with Docker, OpenStack, Mesos, and Hadoop. Today, over 8000 presentations on Slideshare mention Ansible. While it is adaptable to many different applications, Ansible typically performed tasks such as installing and upgrading software packages, installing services, performing horizontal scaling with load balancers, and configuring cloud topologies. It was also used for less orthodox applications, including vending machines, setting up robots and self-driving cars, QA systems for Satellite launches, or setting up Linux-based zoo kiosks.Ansible became a commercial software startup in 2013, including Michael’s design for a management GUI for Ansible called “Ansible Tower”. Ansible Inc quickly grew into a 40-50 person company, with Michael overseeing all aspects of engineering, architecture, product design, documentation, and community leadership. Public users of Ansible quickly grew to include companies like Twitter, eBay, Electronic Arts, NASA, Splunk, Go Pro, Industrial Light and Magic, Riot Games, Pixar, Activision/Blizzard, and more. Ansible sold to Red Hat (now part of IBM) in 2015 for an undisclosed amount, believed to be in the top 10 tech startup exits for the triangle region per ExitEvent.Michael holds over 79 patents around IT automation technology and he is helping shape the next generation of talent produced by NC State, as he currently serves (as of 2019) as a technology consultant to the CSC492 Senior Design undergraduate course.