About

Brent Laster is a seasoned IT professional with over 25 years of leadership experience in helping people and organizations understand, plan and adapt to evolving technology. He is the Director of Research and Development at SAS, where he manages multiple departments with cross-functional teams to provide internal tooling, container and cloud enablement, security oversight, SaaS offerings, deployment support, and devops services. Brent is also an international speaker, trainer, and presenter, and has been awarded Jenkins Ambassador status and the Opensource.com Emerging Contributor award. Brent is an expert in key infrastructure areas and open-source technologies, and he helps to roll out technology and processes across the organization while balancing improvement, research into cloud-native technologies, and long-term support of legacy processes. He has developed and delivered corporate training sessions to help attendees keep up with new technology in the open-source world. Brent is the author of two books, "Professional Git" and "Jenkins 2, Up and Running," and he regularly presents hands-on workshops around topics such as Git, Gradle, Jenkins, Deployment Pipelines, Continuous Delivery, and others at various conferences including the Open Source 101, All Things Open, Continuous Delivery Experience, OSCON, Jenkins World/DevOps World, and Gradle Summit. He also develops and delivers online technical training through Safari and O'Reilly Media. Brent has managed multiple teams charged with cloud enablement, container development, security oversight, SaaS offerings, operational tooling, and deployment pieces at SAS. He has also previously managed source management and build engineering teams and teams responsible for Release Engineering processes. Brent has a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Arkansas Tech University. His relevant experience in the field is 19.36 years.