“Collectively we are smarter” is the premise behind open-source projects. In the five years since its start as a Linux Foundation project to incubate container technology, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has nurtured and promoted the smarts of tens of thousands of contributors from across the globe.

Today, the foundation announced that longtime CNCF contributor, cloud-native expert and leader in the open-source community Priyanka Sharma (pictured) will take the role of general manager.

“Priyanka’s contributions to CNCF as a speaker, governing board member, and community leader over the last several years have been invaluable,” said Dan Kohn, the current CNCF executive director, who will be moving to a new Linux Foundation initiative focused on fighting COVID-19. “I think she is a great choice to lead the organization to its next stage.”

A commitment to open source and cloud native

Sharma’s first contribution to the CNCF was as a member of the OpenTracing team in 2016. The foundation was less than a year old, and OpenTracing was its third project.

Today, the CNCF has close to 50 projects, 560 member organizations, and almost 90,000 contributors. In 2019, it experienced an 89% increase in its end users and currently has the largest end-user community of any open-source foundation. Its first project Kubernetes has benefited from the collective contributions of more than 35,000 community members, and it’s now the accepted standard for containerized application management.

“This move toward DevOps, towards cloud native, towards Kubernetes is happening and happening really strong,” Sharma said.

In an exclusive interview with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, Sharma discussed her appointment and her plans for the future of the organization.

Listen and learn to build better software

The CNCF community is one of the most diverse in computing, with contributors across the globe. Of the 31 employees, 63% are women, 36% are men and fewer than 1% nonbinary. Listening and learning from this community is Sharma’s first priority as she takes the helm of the CNCF.

“There’s just so many different types of people all united in our interest and desire to learn more about cloud native,” she said.

Those voices come from across the CNCF community: board members, the technical oversight committee, project maintainers, contributors, end-users, and even potential developers who could be contributors.

The CNCF now has 10 graduated projects gaining adoption across the globe, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and Jaeger. That they have been certified as graduated means they have passed security audits, have diverse contributors, and good governance. “So, you as an end user can feel very secure adopting them,” Sharma stated.

True to the CNCF’s core mission “to make cloud-native computing ubiquitous,” Sharma aims to continue the momentum. “We need to build and grow it,” she said, citing a need for deeper developer engagement. “We have so much to do to expand on the knowledge of those projects. We have so much to do to make software just better every day.”

Cloud adoption increases as remote becomes new normal

An opportunity Sharma plans to seize comes from the increase in cloud adoption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “A lot of the workflows have to move on online,” she said. “More people will do online banking; more people will do e-commerce. It’s just that the shift is happening.”

More companies are being forced to become cloud native in order to support the scale of traffic as online consumption increases. And as the demand for cloud-native increases, so the need for the CNCF’s support becomes more critical.

“We, as the foundation, need to be ready to support the end users with education and enablement, certifications, [and] training programs — just to get them across that chasm into a new, even more online focused reality,” Sharma said.

Praising the work done by Kohn and Chief Technology Officer Chris Aniszczyk under Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, Sharma said an enormous amount of work has already been done. “I think that what they have done by not only providing a neutral IP zone where people can contribute and use projects safely, they’ve also created an ecosystem where there is events, there’s educational activity, projects can get documentation support, public relations support,” she said. “It’s a very holistic view.”

Promising “no big changes,” Sharma said she expects to keep the user community growing. “We’ll keep educating; we’ll keep working together,” she said. “This is a team effort.”

Here’s the complete interview with Priyanka Sharma, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of enterprise technology, digital transformation and cultures of innovation:

Photo: Priyanka Sharma