Lin Sun

Co-Founder

Cary, North Carolina, United States22 yrs experience

Key Highlights

Head of Open Source at Solo.io with extensive contributions.
International speaker at major tech conferences worldwide.
Co-author of influential books on Istio and AI in Kubernetes.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Cloud Native expert with strong leadership in open source technologies.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

WebSphere Application ServerJava Enterprise EditionMiddlewarePrivate CloudWebsphereWebSphere PortalSOASolution ArchitectureLinuxAgile MethodologiesCloud ComputingTestingJavaWeb ServicesDistributed Systems

About

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io and a full-time contributor to the open-source community. She serves on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), is a CNCF Ambassador, and maintains Istio, kgateway, and kagent. Lin is an international speaker and keynote presenter at conferences such as KubeCon, PyTorch Conference, APIdays, Open Source Summit, IstioDay, ArgoCon, Open Source SecurityCon, Platform Engineering Day, and KCD events worldwide. Lin is also a co-author of Istio Explained, Istio Ambient Explained, and AI Agents in Kubernetes, sharing her insights into gateways, service mesh, MCP, and AI agents. Lin believes great demos can move both minds and hearts and she brings that belief on stage every time. If you’d like to invite her to speak at your event, feel free to get in touch: https://forms.gle/kedBGPtJdZ9JxRPv9

Experience

22 yrs

Total Experience

3 yrs 2 mos

Average Tenure

2 yrs 9 mos

Current Experience

The linux foundation

Co-Chair, KubeCon & CloudNativeCon

Aug 2025 – Present · 9 mos

Excited to share that I’m serving as Co-Chair for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026, NA 2026, and EU 2027! 🎉 Working alongside my fellow co-chairs and the amazing CNCF team, we’ll be curating an incredible lineup of speakers, workshops, and panels showcasing the best in cloud native technologies.

Solo.io

3 roles

VP of Open Source

Promoted

May 2025 – Present · 1 yr

Senior Director of Open Source

Promoted

May 2023 – Apr 2025 · 1 yr 11 mos

Director of Open Source

Feb 2021 – Apr 2023 · 2 yrs 2 mos

Head of open source at Solo.io, driving our open source contributions in upstream and technical eminence in the cloud native ecosystem:
Launched Istio ambient Mesh: https://istio.io/latest/blog/2022/introducing-ambient-mesh/
Launched multiple Istio workshops from Solo Academy.
Co-authored Istio Ambient explained book.
Co-host of Hoot livestream

Kagent

Maintainer

May 2025 – Present · 1 yr

Kgateway

Maintainer

Oct 2024 – Present · 1 yr 7 mos

Cloud native computing foundation (cncf)

3 roles

TOC member

Feb 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 3 mos

TAG Network co-chair

Nov 2023 – Feb 2024 · 3 mos

TAG (Technical Advisor Group) Network(https://github.com/cncf/tag-network

Ambassador

Apr 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 1 mo

Istio

Istio Steering Committee Member

Aug 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 9 mos

Ibm

4 roles

Senior Technical Staff Member & Master Inventor

May 2017 – Feb 2021 · 3 yrs 9 mos · RTP, NC

Lin is the overall technical lead for Istio on the IBM team. Istio, an open platform to connect, manage, monitor, and secure microservices, was launched on May 24, 2017 with joint force by IBM, Google, and Lyft. Her responsibilities include but not limited to:
Define Istio strategy and priorities from IBM perspective.
Core contributor and maintainer to Istio.
Define Istio roadmap and technical directions with other Istio Technical Oversight Committee members.
Define Istio governance with other Istio Steering Committee members.
Work closely with various customers to adopt Istio in their cloud journey to meet their security requirement.
Provide technical guidance to IBM Managed Istio team.

Senior Software Engineer at IBM Cloud Platform CTO office

Promoted

Jul 2015 – May 2017 · 1 yr 10 mos · RTP, NC

As part of her work in IBM Cloud Platform CTO office, she worked on various incubation projects to help set the future direction of IBM Cloud. A few projects she worked on:
Created IBM Cloud architecture diagram standards for all cloud services.
Finished a POC project to prove that Kubernetes can serve as the scheduler for Cloud Foundry, by collaborating with other IBM engineers and engineers from HP.
Evaluated Mesos, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes by writing automation, collecting performance metrics and differentiation.
Proactively evaluated new emerging projects for potential partnership.

IBM Container Cloud Development Lead, Senior Software Engineer

Oct 2014 – Jun 2015 · 8 mos · RTP, NC

Led the IBM Container cloud delivery that is hosted in IBM bluemix. IBM Container cloud is built on Docker containers and allow users to deploy containers in the cloud with speed, agility and security provided by IBM Cloud. Lin travelled to IBM InterConnect 2015 conference and led a container lab [1]. She is also a co-speaker on a IBM container inner circle session, PureApp and Docker customer feedback roundtable sessions. She also co-led a IBM Container partner tutorial at DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco.
[1] Lab: Build Highly Available and Elastic Cloud Services with Docker - 3545A

PureSystem Pattern Engine Development Lead & Master Inventor

May 2011 – Jun 2014 · 3 yrs 1 mo · RTP, NC

Led a team of 10+ people to develop the new pattern engine for Pure Application System that is also used in Pure Application Service in Soft Layer and IBM Cloud Orchestrator. Presented to many client briefings, communicated to many of our business partners and internal team. She travelled to IBM Impact Conference yearly since 2011 where she led PureApp pattern sessions/labs, and spoke to many clients about Pure App.

Istio

3 roles

Istio Technical Oversight Committee Member

Jan 2017 – Present · 9 yrs 4 mos

Maintainer

Jan 2017 – Present · 9 yrs 4 mos

Steering Committee Member

Jan 2017 – Feb 2021 · 4 yrs 1 mo

Osgi alliance eeg

Advisory Software Engineer

Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 · 2 yrs

Develop RFC 98 Transaction in OSGi TCK, develop reference implementation using Apache Aries.

Ibm

WebSphere OSGi Feature Pack developer

Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 · 2 yrs · RTC, NC

Participated in Apache Aries open source project and earned committer privilege. Key developer for WebSphere OSGi feature pack which consumes Apache Aries.

The apache software foundation

Apache Geronimo Committer and PMC member

Apr 2007 – Dec 2010 · 3 yrs 8 mos

Develop Apache Geronimo web service integration and plugable component framework, work with PMC to drive the future direction of Apache Geronimo.

Ibm

Staff Software Engineer

Jan 2002 – Mar 2005 · 3 yrs 2 mos · RTP, NC

Function and system test of WebSphere Everyplace Access and developed automation clients to drive testing of data synchronization with John Diller. Won Test Excellence Award in 2003 and presented the testing tool at the 2003 IBM Test Symposium in Toronto.