Michael Meskes

President at Meskes

About

Michael Meskes holds a Ph.D. in database science and has worked in the open-source industry his whole career. After his time at RWTH Aachen university he started and ran credativ, a pure open-source company that is now part of NetApp, where Michael is still leading the same group of open-source enthusiasts. On top of that he is tasked with improving open-source work within NetApp.

Coming from the Unix landscape he started working on free and open-source software in 1993 and subsequently joined several free software projects like the Linux kernel (1994), Debian GNU/Linux (1995) and PostgreSQL (1996). He is still active as a Debian developer and a PostgreSQL committer as much as his real life commitments allow him to.

Michael has engaged in significant open-source evangelism and given related presentations at numerous events. He teaches open-source infrastructure and cloud components at a local university as an adjunct professor.

Michael Meskes has presented the following presentations

How I took my open source business to a Fortune 500 company at Postgres Conference 2025

presented by Michael Meskes
You’ve started your open source business or you plan to? And you don’t know what to look for for a good exit? In particular selling to a very large company is challenging. There are a lot of differences and traps you may never expect that can significantly change the outcome. Based on the experience of several deals on the executive level this presentation walks you through the process and shar...
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Wed 19 2025 Professional Development
Open Source At A Crossroads at Postgres Conference 2024

presented by Michael Meskes
For the first time in history almost everyone uses Open Source, albeit often without getting the benefits of Free Software. Open Source has accomplished unparalleled success in the IT industry, but with success comes challenges and risks. Over recent decades we have seen business models change while the industry and the users found the best ways to use Open Source. With Software as a Service we...
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Thu 18 2024 Essentials
Open Source in the Age of Cloud and Microservices at Silicon Valley 2023

presented by Michael Meskes
The movement to cloud and microservice architectures have changed the industry quite a bit recently. These changes have an influence on open source both from a community and from a business perspective.
This presentation takes you on a journey of 30+ years of free and open-source software development. It shows the evolution of the movement and the ecosystem. With changes in business models o...
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Thu 20 2023 Dev
Open Source - The Next Step at Beijing 2019

presented by Michael Meskes
No single Open Source project can exist all by itself, all software tools run in an environment that consists of a lot of other software, most if not all of which again can be Open Source. Likewise there are Open Source projects whose goal it is to integrate different tools to create a full blown solution for users. The first such projects were Linux distributions, but the current way of d...
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Fri 5 2019 English Speaker Track
Dialogue program at Beijing 2019
Dialogue program
presented by Joshua Drake, Oleg Bartunov, Xiao Jun Zheng, Grant Zhou, and Michael Meskes
Traditional Dialogue Program
Thu 4 2019 Main
Taking care of the elephant at Silicon Valley
The whys and hows of Elephant Shed
presented by Michael Meskes
The Elephant Shed is an Open Source PostgreSQL Appliance that bundles and integrates proven components, required for easy management of a PostgreSQL server. Proven tools for all relevant aspects are already preinstalled and preconfigured. The majority of these tools can be controlled via a comfortable web interface. Even experienced PostgreSQL administrators will hardly find an area not covered...
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Mon 15 2018 Ops
POWER Platform - The New Home For PostgreSQL at PGConf US 2017 [PgConf.US]

presented by Michael Meskes

video
The IBM POWER platform is an interesting operational basis for mission critical PostgreSQL installations. With the broad adoption of Linux in the POWER ecosphere with the support of Little Endian distributions like Debian or Ubuntu nowadays, this opens the door for the whole PostgreSQL world gaping wide. This talk will share experiences in packaging, scaling and operating PostgreSQL on Linux on...
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Operations
PostgreSQL Power on Power at PGConf US 2016 [PgConf.US]

presented by Michael Meskes
An interesting report about the long-term use of PostgreSQL on IBM Power architecture. Based on the experiences of a large commercial enterprise, performance and availabilty numbers will be presented together with the development of an infrastructure, which has grown over the years fulfilling more and more requirements. In conjunction with IBM Power PostgreSQL provides impressive results in ter...
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Operations
PostgreSQL - Community meets Business at PGConf US 2015 [PgConf.US]

presented by Michael Meskes
This presentation shows why the software created by the PostgreSQL community is (one of) the most important pieces of Open Source for business users. It gives some motivations for the immense growth in enterprise space PostgreSQL experienced in recent years. With PostgreSQL not only fulfilling the technical requirements, but also the operations requirements it quickly became a strategical choic...
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Strategy
Taking care of the elephant at PostgresConf US 2018
The whys and hows of Elephant Shed
presented by Michael Meskes
The Elephant Shed is an Open Source PostgreSQL Appliance that bundles and integrates proven components, required for easy management of a PostgreSQL server. Proven tools for all relevant aspects are already preinstalled and preconfigured. The majority of these tools can be controlled via a comfortable web interface. Even experienced PostgreSQL administrators will hardly find an area not covered...
more
Wed 18 2018 Operations and Administration