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This year has brought some major changes to the governance of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which we are very excited to share with you. First off, Craig McLuckie, vice president of research and development at VMware, has been elected as the chair of the Cloud Foundry Governing Board. As an industry leader in cloud native technologies and a co-founder of Kubernetes, his stewardship should prove a major asset for the Cloud Foundry project and community.

“Cloud Foundry, both the open source project and the commercial distributions built on the project, have been instrumental in unlocking cloud native computing methodologies for thousands of developers around the world. It has been and continues to be a major source of innovation, and I am thrilled at the opportunity to participate in this community. Looking to the future, we have an opportunity to not only act as effective stewards of a critical open source project, but to work toward a future where the capabilities that Cloud Foundry pioneered are brought forward into the world of Kubernetes and its affiliated projects,” said Craig upon his appointment as chairperson.

“We will continue to not only ensure that Cloud Foundry offers the best possible experience building and deploying applications in the multicloud world that enterprise organizations found themselves in today,” he continued, “but to continue to push the innovation envelope and find ways to bring the simplicity of experience and scalable operating model of Cloud Foundry to the broader cloud native computing ecosystem.”

On behalf of the Foundation and the entire Cloud Foundry community, welcome Craig!

Technical Oversight Committee

In other exciting news, we elected our inaugural Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) this summer. Five experienced Cloud Foundry practitioners from various organizations were elected in a community vote of hundreds of Cloud Foundry contributors from across the globe. Our TOC is now composed of the following members: Lee Porte (GOV.UK), Jan von Loewenstein (SAP), Stephan Merker (SAP), Eric Malm (VMware), and David Stevenson (VMware). Between them, they come with decades of participation in the Cloud Foundry community, deep experience in operating Cloud Foundry at scale, and — most important of all — shared passion to curate the open source community.

Porte said of his participation as part of the TOC, “Increasing community participation is a key element in driving Cloud Foundry forward, and by undertaking the move away from the dojo model, we’re hoping to see a significant increase in the number of community participants. I’m overjoyed to be part of the team driving this change.”

Under their leadership, the new governance model has been rolled out with various working groups given responsibility for the different projects owned by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Seven working groups have been formed: App Runtime Interfaces, App Runtime Platform, Foundational Infrastructure, Paketo Buildpacks, Vulnerability Management, Service Management and Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes.

“These working groups address the bigger functional areas of Cloud Foundry,” said Merker. “Their task is to evolve the functional areas, to attract more community and, of course, to work together to deliver the overall ‘cf-push’ experience for which Cloud Foundry is well known.”

“We’re aiming to introduce unprecedented transparency in the way the community operates, and we’ve moved away from the old Dojo model, making pair-programming optional and introducing a ‘good first issue’ tag,” added Loewenstein, about how they’re working to simplify contributions to Cloud Foundry and related projects, especially for first-time contributors.

What to Look Forward to in 2022

With all of these changes, here’s what to look forward to in the upcoming year, according to Malm: “We’re already seeing more open and active collaboration within the new working groups, and we’re all now establishing the next level of transparent and inclusive process across the community. I’m looking forward to the point where that process feels supportive and natural for everyone, whether a CF veteran or a first-time contributor, and then just helps the community continue to do great work together.”

According to Stevenson, “Knowing that so many developers are getting all-the-way-to-production value out of CF push” is what gets him excited about the Cloud Foundry project. “There are a lot of competing application container platforms out there, but few that can support our level of scale and stability.”

We’re also happy to report several improvements to the core CF experience. The CF API has seen commendable performance gains, especially for large-scale deployments. More details are available here.

The past year has seen rather sweeping change at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and as a result there is much to look forward to in the upcoming year.

Compiled jointly with Ram Iyengar, developer advocate at Cloud Foundry Foundation.