Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling is an American author, open-source developer and hardware reviewer best known for his YouTube channel about Raspberry Pi, homelabs and servers, and for Ansible for DevOps, the self-published book that has sold more than 87,000 copies. He also maintains dozens of widely used Ansible roles and open-source projects, funded largely by GitHub Sponsors and Patreon supporters.

Based in St. Louis, Geerling began his career building a website for his father that showed song titles and artists for the radio station KYKY. He studied at Saint Louis University and Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, then worked as director of web development for the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, CTO of Flocknote, a senior technical architect at Acquia and a technical consultant for Ansible by Red Hat. Since 2009 he has run his own company, Midwestern Mac, LLC.

He became known in the Drupal and DevOps worlds through his open-source Ansible work and his book. He self-published Ansible for DevOps on Leanpub and kept updating it for free; in June 2023, after 41 revisions, he reported 87,234 copies sold and more than $300,000 in revenue, earning 30% to 80% per sale compared with the 5% to 10% royalties publishers offered. He has followed it with Ansible for Kubernetes and Kubernetes 101.

In 2021 he went full-time on YouTube. His main channel passed one million subscribers, with second channels Level 2 Jeff and Geerling Engineering. He is known for ambitious Raspberry Pi projects such as a petabyte storage array, Pi clusters and external GPUs on a Pi, and in 2025 he launched Project MINI RACK for compact 10-inch homelab racks. He has written that his open-source work depends on sponsors on Patreon and GitHub, and in 2024 he made news when a company cloned his voice with AI without permission.

Geerling matters as a model for funding open-source maintenance through a mix of self-published books, an audience and direct sponsorship.