The Cloud Foundry Foundation, the home of the Cloud Foundry open source development platform for cloud-native applications, today announced that Catherine McGarvey, a vice president of software engineering at VMware, is the new chair of its governing board. She succeeds Kubernetes co-founder and VMware VP of R&D Craig McLuckie, who took the role in late 2021. McLuckie recently left VMware, though (while former Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers recently joined it). Because it’s the Foundation’s members who make up the governing board, that also meant that the Foundation had to find a new chair.
It’s worth noting that the governing board’s focus is on managing the Foundation’s business and IP. Technical decision making is handled by the Technical Oversight Committee and various working groups.
McGarvey is no stranger to the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. At VMware, her work already involved working with a number of open source communities — including Cloud Foundry — and supporting projects like Spring, knative, carve, Kubernetes and RabbitMQ.
“Catherine has been working with Cloud Foundry for more than 10 years in various capacities,” said Chris Clark, program manager, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “She brings a wealth of experience in both technical and managerial aspects of Cloud Foundry and other associated projects/products. Her experience with Kubernetes comes at a crucial time for projects like Korifi, which are critical to the success of the community as a whole. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is pleased to welcome Catherine, with her passion and product expertise, to lead the Governing Board.”
The Foundation also today announced that it is now publishing open roadmaps for its working groups. The idea here is to improve the overall transparency of the project but also to make it easier for vendors and to participate in the development process.
“The transparency added by open roadmaps for open source projects helps engineering teams plan their feature development and focus engineering efforts,” said Ram Iyengar, chief evangelist at Cloud Foundry. “For consumers of the project, it will facilitate better collaboration and allow them to contribute more freely to the project. Overall, the productivity and efficiency of the community goes up while allowing engineering teams to streamline their work.”