Posted on June 6, 2025 by Priyanka Sharma

After five extraordinary years, I’m stepping down from my role as Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

A Journey of Growth and Impact

Leading CNCF has been the honor of a lifetime. I joined the cloud native community nine years ago in 2016 as a contributor to the OpenTracing (now OpenTelemetry) and Jaeger projects. Over time, I grew with the community, keynoting at KubeCons about observability, getting elected to the CNCF governing board while at GitLab. Being asked to run the foundation after that was a dream come true.

This role has shaped me in ways no other job could—expanding my leadership, sharpening my strategic thinking, teaching me to operationalize a complex multi-stakeholder ecosystem, and giving me the front row seat to some of the most impactful innovation in technology in the last decade.

When I joined CNCF in 2020, we had just entered the COVID-19 pandemic era. What had been built over the previous years was at risk as the world came to a standstill. But cloud native prevailed. Over the next five years, we built on the original momentum and scaled CNCF into a force of further global significance. The numbers speak volumes:

A Grateful Goodbye

The heart of CNCF is its people. The maintainers, contributors, end users, and staff who pour themselves into this work every day have inspired me more than I can express. Your belief in open source, in collaboration, and in building something bigger than ourselves is what makes CNCF so special.

To the Governing Board, the Technical Oversight Committee, our member companies, and my incredible colleagues—thank you for your trust, your partnership, and your friendship.

CNCF’s best chapters are still ahead. With the rise of platform engineering, the acceleration of AI workloads, and a passionate global community behind it, CNCF is poised to lead the next wave of innovation. I’ll be cheering from the sidelines—and always ready to help however I can. Once #TeamCloudNative, always #TeamCloudNative 🙏🏼.

What’s Next

The last 10 years in this ecosystem have been rewarding, thrilling, and at times dizzying. As I look at the changes coming with AI, I feel the same thrall that I did when I was entering distributed systems and cloud native infrastructure a decade ago. Today, I am curious about the impact of generative AI on open source communities. The excitement is also back in the application layer where so much can be achieved that was far out of reach before. And as we reverberate with opportunity, how do we utilize probabilistic technologies when we have been used to deterministic ones? I am looking forward to spending more time exploring these vectors, along with investing in polishing up my Python (yes, in the era of vibe coding, I’m old school :)). Stay tuned to hear what’s next for me in due time on LinkedIn. Until then, sayonara.

With deep gratitude and admiration,

Priyanka Sharma