About

I'm William "Bill" Easton — strawgate online. I work in the unglamorous layers where systems either become reliable or become expensive stories. By day, that means driving observability and ingest at Elastic. By night, it means agent infrastructure, storage abstractions, and open-source work that usually gets noticed only after it saves someone a very bad week.

What I do now

Since August 2023 I've been Director of Product Management for Observability at Elastic. I direct the data-ingest portfolio — the tools customers use to move petabytes of data a day into Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud. That means OpenTelemetry Collector, EDOT (the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry), SDKs and Profiling, Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent, and APM Server. The short version is that I work on the front door to the platform, and front doors have a way of becoming everybody's problem at once.

I'm also an internal and external champion for Elastic's integration with the GenAI and agent ecosystem — tools, MCP, and everything adjacent. A large part of my role is translating between what infrastructure teams need, what product teams want, and what users will actually tolerate.

FastMCP and the MCP work

Since August 2025 I've been one of two core maintainers of FastMCP, the most popular Python framework for Model Context Protocol. I architected and delivered Tool Transformation, shipped MCP Sampling capabilities, and spend a lot of time on Storage and the wrapping primitives that let one MCP server compose many.

Jeremiah Lowin, FastMCP's creator, put it this way when he announced my maintainer role:

Bill showed up months ago — long before MCP was cool — and immediately began insisting on the need for utilities to manipulate, transform, and compose MCP servers into more usable forms. Many of Bill's contributions are the type we prize most in the open-source world: critical internal optimizations and fixes that ensure your server just works, even if you're not aware you're using them.

— Jeremiah Lowin

py-key-value, and the rest of the agent stack

I also maintain py-key-value — a top-1000 open-source Python library with more than 2 million downloads per day. It abstracts the differences between fifteen-plus key-value and KV-compatible stores (in-memory, Redis, Valkey, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, and more) so that frameworks and libraries can add storage without binding themselves to a backend.

Beyond the projects I maintain, I try to be a useful citizen across the broader agent ecosystem. When something adjacent needs doing, I prefer shipping a patch over writing a thread about why someone else should do it.

Before Elastic

Before Elastic, I was a Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon within the Security organization (May 2022 – August 2023). I led product for a 120-person business unit with teams in Toronto, Seattle, and India, building silicon-to-cloud endpoint security for Amazon's corporate workforce. The devices I helped ship were deployed to over 500,000 people across 100+ countries, built on Amazon-custom silicon, firmware, and operating systems to defend against well-funded nation-state adversaries.

Before Amazon, I was Chief Technology Officer at Verve Industrial Protection (2017 – May 2022). I grew the engineering and product organization from five people to more than eighty, and launched a turnkey security, observability, and security-data-lake product for critical infrastructure — used by Berkshire Hathaway, Baxter Pharmaceuticals, Duracell, and others. The secret sauce was our cross-vendor, agentless ICS inventory capability: find and assess vulnerabilities in industrial control environments without a span port or a network tap. The company was acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2022, forming the foundation of Rockwell's cybersecurity portfolio.

Earlier

Earlier I was Technical Product Manager at Ivanti / RES Software (2016–2017), the sole TPM providing application-allowlisting capabilities to US federal agencies implementing DHS's Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program across more than five million endpoints. I brought that project from a year behind schedule to three months ahead.

Before that I was a Principal Consultant and Services Product Manager at Tech Data / Avnet (2015–2016), coordinating Identity, SIEM, Patch Management, and Vulnerability Management services into key partners and customers.

And earlier still: Endpoint Security Specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011–2015), covering compliance-heavy environments — CJIS, PCI-DSS, and the Federal Select Agent program for biological select agents and toxins. This is where I spent most of my twenties learning how large fleets of endpoints actually break in production. A lot of the instincts I use in FastMCP and py-key-value were calibrated here.

Security research

A sampler from the security side of my career:

• Log4Shell Detection (2022) — open-sourced a Log4j detection tool that used 90% fewer resources and ran 99% faster than incumbent scanners, with no false positives. Picked up by more than 150 companies.
• NVD Coordination (2022) — coordinated with NIST to fix thousands of errors in the National Vulnerability Database.
• Microsoft Bug Bounty (2022) — $3,000 award and public recognition for a private vulnerability disclosure.
• Microsoft PowerShell + Windows Defender Application Control (2021) — privately disclosed several major vulnerabilities.
• IBM BigFix (2021 and earlier) — CVE-2016-0214, CVE-2017-1222, CVE-2017-1466, plus additional disclosures.

Full index on the disclosures page.

Why I write here

MCP is still largely in its "ship a demo and call it done" phase. I'm not interested in demos. I care about what it takes to make these systems behave predictably in production — tool surfaces that don't poison agents, transport lifecycles that don't leak memory after a week, and sampling strategies that don't surprise the finance team. My security background mostly shows up as a habit of asking, "And then what?" before declaring something done.

If you're thinking about MCP at scale, or you want to argue with something I've written, the fastest way is to open an issue on GitHub or email me at bill@strawgate.com.

Outside work

I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I raise guide dogs for Occupaws Guide Dog Association and I'm a children's advocate at a domestic abuse shelter. None of that is for branding. It is just part of being a person.