Christian Ehrhardt
Director Of Engineering at Canonical
Wernersberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristian Ehrhardt is a seasoned engineering leader with 11+ years at Canonical and over two decades in Linux and systems engineering, now serving as Director of Engineering for the Canonical Server Team. He combines deep expertise in virtualization, performance analysis, OS internals and secure systems with hands-on experience improving test infrastructure and QA for widely used open-source projects like cloud-init and systemd. Known for pragmatic debugging and packaging/delivery skills, he has driven reliability and security improvements by hardening seccomp behavior, tightening memory tests, and expanding unit-test coverage for package sources. His background as a Linux performance specialist at IBM and a Diplom-Informatiker from Karlsruhe University underpins a data-driven approach to engineering leadership and automation. Colleagues value his ability to translate low-level systems work into production-grade practices and to mentor teams through complex infrastructure challenges.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Diplom-Informatiker Computer Science, Diplom-Informatiker Computer Science at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences
Stackoverflow
151reputation
20kreached
3answers
0questions
Github Skills (24)
unit-testing10
seccomp10
pytest10
python10
cloud-init10
testing10
init10
linux10
c1110
c1710
automation10
mocks10
mocker10
systemd10
automations10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
canonical/cloud-init
Feb 2022 - Jan 2025
Official upstream for the cloud-init: cloud instance initialization
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:3 reviews, 1 PR, 13 comments in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Christian primarily contributed to the testing framework for the cloud-init project. They wrote and expanded unit tests for the `apt_source` configuration handler, covering basic functionality, mirror and release replacements, and PPA integration. The contributions also included mocking external dependencies and improving the overall test coverage and reliability, with an emphasis on testing edge cases.
cloud-initpython
systemd/systemd
Jul 2017 - Oct 2022
The systemd System and Service Manager
Role in this project:Back-end Engineer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Engineer & Automation EngineerContributions:3 PRs, 46 comments, 7 issues in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Christian primarily focused on enhancing the systemd project's security and test infrastructure. Their contributions included fixing a seccomp-related bug dealing with multiplexed system calls and improving the accuracy of memory write/execute tests. Additionally, the user modified test scripts to increase timeouts for tests that were shown to be unreliable and updated the QEMU arguments used in one of the tests to reflect changes in QEMU versions. These contributions demonstrate a focus on improving system security and automated testing processes.
systemdclinuxinitservices
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