Brian Aker, born August 4, 1972, in Lexington, Kentucky, US, is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database.

He led Sun's web scaling research group, where he worked on the Drizzle database project.

After graduating with triple majors in environmental science, computing and mathematics, from Antioch College, Aker contributed to his first open source project, the 386BSD operating system.

However, he extended the system to ensure it allowed multiple database back-ends, and became a published author along the way, writing Running Weblogs with Slash (ISBN 978-0596001001) with chromatic and Dave Krieger.

While not traveling and presenting at about six open source related conferences a year, he resides in Seattle, Washington.