Governing Board

Alan heads the HCL Cloud Native & AI Labs business and is also the HCL CTO for Cloud Native.  A successful entrepreneur and technologist, Alan is deeply passionate about using technology to support the digital transformation of business and driving the creation of innovative products and services.

Alan has an extensive track record as both a visionary and thought leader. He combines in-depth engineering credibility with real hands-on experience leading global technology organizations. With a track record of bringing over 250 software products to market, Alan has a unique perspective on the application of modern Cloud-enabled services to accelerate market success.

HCL Cloud Native & AI Labs are the HCL Centre of Excellence, helping clients leverage modern technologies and practices to accelerate transformation.

Working closely with HCL ecosystem partners, the Labs showcase the Art-of-the-Possible, and with a track record of over 1,000 engagements, the Labs are uniquely positioned to guide our clients’ complete journey.

The Labs provide engineering assistance to modernize existing applications, or to create innovative new solutions. Deeply collaborative, our Labs also provide education and skills modernization to support the cultural transformation necessary to make the vision of a Cloud Native Enterprise become a reality.

Alan leads HCL corporate participation in leading open-source communities such as the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

He is a Fellow of both the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs.

Alena is a software engineer at Apple, working on cloud infrastructure services. Prior to joining Apple, Alena was one of the founding engineers at Rancher Labs. She also served as CNCF TOC in 2020-2022.

April is a seasoned CNCF contributor with hands-on experience in Kubernetes, Istio, Knative, gRPC, and more. At Google’s OSPO, she strategically guides projects to the right foundations for success. Passionate about open source in video game development, she manages several of Google’s initiatives in this space.

Beyond tech, April is an avid crafter, gamer, and devoted mom to two adorable Australian Shepherds.

Arun Gupta is vice president and general manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel Corporation. He is an open source strategist, advocate, and practitioner for nearly two decades. He has taken companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems through systemic changes to embrace open source principles, contribute and collaborate effectively. As an elected chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Governing Board, Arun works with CNCF leadership and member companies to grow cloud native ecosystem. He has delivered technical talks in 45+ countries, authored multiple books, and is a Docker Captain, Java Champion, and Java User Group leader. He also founded the Devoxx4Kids chapter in the U.S. and continues to promote technology education among children. Arun holds two patents on using XML and XSL for an efficient generation of test reports. Arun is an avid runner, and is easily accessible at @arungupta on Twitter.

Barry is responsible for growing Kubernetes across AWS including Amazon EKS, Amazon EKS Anywhere and RedHat Open Shift.

Barry joined Amazon in 2022 from DigitalOcean, whereas CTO he led the organization through its IPO. A global enterprise technology veteran, Barry brings 25 years of experience across all aspects of technology, from board design, FPGA based hardware, and operating systems, to application microservices and cloud. Over the course of his career, Barry has twice led teams through successful IPOs. His previous experience includes DigitalOcean, VMware, and Sun Microsystems. Barry holds a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.

Bill is Director of Huawei’s Open Source and Developer Department and also serves as Huawei’s Chief Open Source Liaison Officer. In this role, he is for responsible for using open source to build industrial ecosystems, expand industrial spaces, and build a healthy and harmonious industrial environment.

Christoph is an Architect and Senior Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Red Hat and a maintainer of the Kubernetes project. He has served two terms on the Kubernetes Steering Committee, is a Technical Lead for SIG Contributor Experience, and a co-chair for the CNCF Code of Conduct working group. If he’s not reviewing PRs, he is probably walking his dog.

Craig is Senior Director of Developer Relations at cloud-native application networking company Solo.io, and a Steering Committee member for the Istio project.

Prior to Solo, Craig had a number of roles at Google, including leading Google’s participation in Istio, Head of GTM launching GKE, and leader of the Cloud Native developer relations team, responsible for Kubernetes, GKE and Anthos. He was the founder and co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, producing the top 20 show for over four years.

Craig has worked with Cloud Native customers and communities since the launch of Kubernetes in 2014, and has delivered talks on 6 continents, including a KubeCon keynote. He started his career when DevOps was called ‘systems administration’, and has 20 years of experience in development, deployment, DevOps, consulting, advisory and management roles around the world.

Jan Melén is an expert in networking, open-source software, and cloud technologies, with a career spanning over two decades. He is a staunch advocate for Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) adoption within Ericsson and the broader community he engages with.

Jan has served as a Research Leader for Cloud Research, driving innovations in cloud computing. Since 2019, he has led a team dedicated to CNCF open-source projects, contributing significantly to Ericsson’s Kubernetes distribution, and fostering an “upstream-first” culture within the company. He now oversees Ericsson’s open-source contributions and coordinates collaborations with CNCF projects. With his technical expertise and leadership, Jan aims to support CNCF’s mission and strengthen the global cloud-native ecosystem.

Jenn is the Senior Manager for Software Engineering Engagements at Boeing. Her organization includes the Open Source Program Office, Enterprise Software Continuous Improvement, Software Compliance and Productivity, and Digital Transformation Environments. She has been working in open source and cloud native for over 10 years, and has a wealth of experience in software engineering leadership roles across aerospace, defense, and biotech industries. Jenn holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Zoology, and a Master’s degree in Computational Biosciences from Arizona State University.

Jeremy is the VP of technical community and open source at Datadog, where he’s responsible for developer advocacy, training, documentation, technical writing, multiple engineering teams, and the open source programs office. An ardent but realistic open source advocate with a pragmatic approach, he is the founder of LinuxQuestions.org, which is one of the largest independent open source communities on the web. An early podcaster, he’s currently a presenter on Bad Voltage. He’s also on the board of the Linux Fund. Before joining Datadog Jeremy ran a consultancy helping organizations implement open source programs, find viable open source business models, and grow technical communities. He’s spoken at a variety of conferences, had a column in Linux Magazine, was an ambassador for Opensource.com, and regularly blogged about the intersection of business and open source. Outside of technology he is an avid runner and foodie, and long time Buffalo Bills fan.

Justin Dustzadeh is the Chief Technology Officer at Equinix. In this role, Justin drives the company’s technology vision, strategy and architecture as well as the overall technical innovation and focus on software transformation and engagement within the developer community, including within the Linux Foundation.

Justin is an industry-recognized thought leader on cloud-native technologies and software-defined infrastructure and has a wealth of executive and technical leadership experience, including leadership roles at Uber (where he served as Head of Global Network & Software Platform), Visa, Huawei, Ericsson, AT&T, a technology startup which he co-founded, and two leading service providers in France.

He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Télécom Paris, and a B.S. in Theoretical Physics from École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) in Paris.

Karena Angell is a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and was a Technical Lead for the CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) App Delivery. She is also a Senior Principal Technical Product Manager at Red Hat focused on upstream projects, including Kubernetes. She has a broad background within various disciplines including Product Management, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Solution design and management, Marketing, IT Service Management and technical community building. She has also worked extensively within Commercial and Government enterprises. These experiences give her a unique understanding of how to guide strategic efforts to engage community members and drive increased CNCF involvement.

Lachlan is a Principal Program Manager on the open source team at Azure. As a cloud native ambassador, emeritus Kubernetes release lead, and Helm charts maintainer, Lachlan has deep operational knowledge of many Cloud Native projects. He spends his days building and contributing to software that addresses key challenges in the Cloud Native ecosystem.

Li Yi (Mark), is the Director of Engineering for Container Service at Alibaba Cloud. Mark leads the product development and technical strategy for the container product portfolio at Alibaba Cloud. His team contributes to a variety of Open Source communities in CNCF such as Kubernetes, containerd, Dragonfly, Argo, and more. Previously Mark worked at IBM for 14 years as Senior Technical Staff Member in cloud computing and middleware areas.

Naresh holds the position of Associate Vice President and Global Head of Modernization Practice at Infosys. In his role, he oversees the development of intellectual property (IP), collaboration with modernization partners, and introduction of new services within the domain of application modernization. The practice led by Naresh takes a prominent role in spearheading application transformation initiatives across diverse industries and service lines. It places particular emphasis on four fundamental pillars of application modernization: Open Source, Agile/DevOps, Legacy modernization, and Cloud.

Over the course of his 29-year career, Naresh has occupied various roles that have encompassed IT services delivery, program management, enterprise architecture, as well as incubating and fostering multiple specialized groups.

Naresh holds a B Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India.

Ricardo leads the Platform Infrastructure team at CERN with a strong focus on cloud native deployments and machine learning. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a lead of the CNCF Research User Group. Prior to this work Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Sebastian Scheele is CEO and co-founder of Kubermatic, focused on developing open core software solutions for automating Kubernetes operations, at scale. Sebastian, a developer himself, has his finger on the pulse of where the Kubernetes landscape is going and is contributing many of his team’s resources to upstream K8s development. As one of the early pioneers in the cloud native ecosystem, he has helped hundreds of enterprises embrace Kubernetes to solve cutting edge challenges in both cloud and edge computing.

Sebastian speaks at numerous conferences around the world about the impact of Kubernetes and cloud native technologies for IT.

Sudha is the VP for all the services in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Developer Platform. OCI’s developer services aim to improve productivity for all roles performed by Developer Security Operations engineers. Enabling a secure, fast, and connected developer platform across all Oracle internal and external cloud engineers is her team’s goal. She prides herself in running numerous large cloud scale distributed services developed in house using open-source technologies.

She is also a founding committee member of the Oracle Women’s Leadership (OWL), Seattle chapter and runs several mentoring rings. She has a Masters in Computer Science and has previously worked at Microsoft Bing. She is a goal-driven technology leader with a passion to attract more women into leadership positions.

Takao is a Senior Professional Engineer of the Linux development division at Fujitsu. He has contributed to several open source communities more than 20 years. He has worked for Linux kernel RAS feature, especially crash dump feature like netdump, diskdump and kdump. He has also joined QEMU, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and more OSS projects and contributed to them. Now he is leading a support team of Linux-based products for Fujitsu’s customers.

Thomas Di Giacomo is Chief Technology and Product Officer for SUSE, where he leads our global Office of the CTO and Product and Solution Management. His team covers SUSE’s entire portfolio of products as well as innovation priorities. He is also responsible for driving and guiding SUSE’s current and future technology and solutions, and for sharing SUSE’s vision with customers, partners, and key industry stakeholders.

Prior to his role, Thomas was SUSE’s President of Engineering & Innovation and was responsible for the rapid growth of SUSE’s expanding portfolio. He has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, serving in various global leadership and executive roles in engineering and product innovation.

Thomas holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Geneva, and lives in France.

Vasu is Vice President and Chief Architect on topics concerning the Cloud Native Strategy at SAP. Having always been accused of having his head in the clouds, he went on to make it his career. In his current role, he works with several cross-product initiatives to foster the cloud native mindset across engineering teams. In spite of having a very brown thumb, he went green by reaching into the bountiful cloud native and open source ecosystem and was instrumental in establishing Kubernetes (with Project Gardener) as the modern foundation at SAP. As a champion of cloud native development, advocating both inner and open source technologies, he aims to make innovation simpler for both SAP and its customers. Vasu holds a degree in Physics and Computer Science from the University of Osnabrück but refuses to be tied down to any geography. He prefers it in the cloud.

Vish is Chief Architect at Heroku, a subsidiary of Salesforce. Formerly he helped Oracle create their cloud, where he focused on virtualization, containerization, and machine learning. He was also NASA Nebula Technical Lead during the creation of Nova, one of the founding OpenStack projects, and was a member of both the OpenStack board and technical committee.

Xin is the VP of Volcano Engine, previously CEO & co-founder of Caicloud and an ex-Googler. Xin has been actively involved in cloud native technology innovation, helping Chinese enterprises to achieve enterprise digital transformation and intelligence.

Yuichi has been engaged with OSS for over 20 years. At Hitachi, he launched an ecosystem of business and OSS contribution model based on Keycloak and is leading Hitachi OSPO as head of OSPO. He is one of the first Japan evangelists of The Linux Foundation and launched Cloud Native Community Japan as CNCF Japan Chapter with community colleagues. He is also on the board of the Linux Foundation.