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What Lies Ahead for Cloud Foundry

abby kearns chip childers

Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky to witness the evolution of Cloud Foundry. From a commercial product owned by VMware and VMware to its rebirth as an open source foundation, Cloud Foundry is a great example of the evolution of the technology industry as a whole. Beginning in January of 2015, the Cloud Foundry Foundation began to establish business and technology governance, building a strategy that has since rooted Cloud Foundry as the leading cloud application platform. Earlier this year, I joined the Foundation as its first Fellow before transitioning to a full-time position as the Vice President of Strategy. There is no place else I’d rather be.

This is why I’m thrilled to announce I am taking over Cloud Foundry Foundation as the Executive Director. I am passionate about Cloud Foundry, our community and our ecosystem. I’m proud of what Sam Ramji and the Foundation team have accomplished and the value we bring to enterprise organizations. Through the years I’ve been fortunate to work closely with most of our community, and I look forward to expanding that engagement — and the community itself — in 2017.

As Cloud Foundry moves into its next phase, it will continue to drive innovation deeper into the enterprise. We will continue to empower developers to build applications quickly, while helping CIOs transform their businesses. In 2017, our work at the Foundation will focus on expanding the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and addressing the cloud developer gap.

Open source enables innovation through collaboration

With Chip Childers at the helm as our CTO, the Foundation will continue to work with an ever-expanding pool of engineers from across our member companies, as well as other projects and communities, to focus on developing industry-changing technology.

For example, we’re working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to extend the use of the Cloud Foundry Service Broker API and open it up to Kubernetes and other technologies. A ton of progress has been made since Chip wrote about this effort in September. Stay tuned for more on that effort in the next few weeks.

This type of cross-project, cross-technology and cross-company coordination and execution is something only an open source project like ours has the perspective, access and line-of-sight to deliver on. It’s one of the many reasons I am honored to lead the charge.   

The explosive success of the platform over the past 24 months is not an accident. It is thanks to a dedicated and hard-working group of nearly 150 full-time committers who continue to build and refine this platform every single day. This success is also largely thanks to the leadership and guidance of the Cloud Foundry Foundation Board of Directors.

We have a lot in store for you in 2017 and beyond. I look forward to steering this rocket ship as we help shift the future of enterprise computing across the globe.

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Abby Kearns, AUTHOR

Abby is the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
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