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.

Alolita is an OpenTelemetry GC member, CNCF Observability TAG co-chair and CNCF Governing Board alternate board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability practice and contributes to open source and open standards in OpenTelemetry, Unicode, W3C and the Observability TAG.

As a founding member of the CNCF’s End User TAB, Alolita has facilitated participation and contributions by CNCF end user members. She has also promoted end user priorities to the CNCF TOC and Governing Board. Within her rich track record, Alolita has demonstrated a deep commitment to CNCF’s goals and initiatives. Alolita brings a wealth of experience from her board leadership roles in the industry. For example, she has served on the boards of the OSI, SFLC.in and Unicode Consortium. Alolita has also provided strong leadership for observability and search engineering at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

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.

Bob is the EVP and CEO for Heroku at Salesforce. Heroku, a platform as a service (PaaS) built on AWS, enables developers to build, run, and operate applications on the cloud. Prior to his time at Salesforce, Bob was the GM for EKS, EKS-A, ROSA and was responsible for the Amazon OSPO. He was CTO for Samsung’s cloud native effort, ran engineering for HP Cloud, and has worked for a number of startups as a CTO.

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.

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 13 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. Serving as chair on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, North America 2022, Europe 2023, and CloudNativeSecurityCon 2023, she is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities.

Erin is currently the Director of Emerging Technologies and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat in the Office of the CTO. Erin was previously an Apple Cloud Services Engineer at Apple. Erin is a Kubernetes contributor and an Apache Ambari committer. Erin is an active contributor to the Kubernetes Storage SIG and is currently the co-chair of the CNCF Storage SIG. Erin’s main focus today is centered around how to enable storage in a stateless, hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Prior to working at Red Hat, she worked at IBM for 14 years. Erin worked in embedded systems development for several years before moving into global enterprise level services. Erin lives outside of Bozeman, MT with her husband and 5 children. She is a robot enthusiast and FIRST robotics mentor. Her family owns and runs a karate dojo in which they volunteer a considerable amount of time to teaching and empowering all people, especially women and children. And in what spare time she has, she runs marathons.

Jaice Singer DuMars is a cloud native ecosystem specialist and top 1% Kubernetes contributor who has served in many crucial leadership roles in the project over the last 7 years. They are currently a Senior Director of Engineering at VMware, overseeing development of upstream Kubernetes and components within the Tanzu Kubernetes platform. Prior to VMware, Jaice worked on cloud native strategy and engineering at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In their spare time, they can be found playing or hand-engraving saxophones, painting, and drawing.

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.

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.

Liz is Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists Isovalent, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project. She is on the Board of OpenUK, and was Chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee in 2019-2022, and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in 2018. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O’Reilly.

Melissa is passionate about Java, DevOps and Continuous Delivery. She is currently Head of Developer Relations for JFrog, serves on the Continuous Delivery Foundation TOC and is a Co-Chair of the Interoperability SIG. She loves sharing her knowledge with the community as a developer, speaker, and author. Melissa has been recognized as a Java Champion and Docker Captain, is an international speaker at numerous events including KubeCon and DockerCon, and is co-author of the O’Reilly title, DevOps Tools for Java Developers.

Mohammad is leading the cloud and infrastructure architecture for Charter Communications. He is responsible for driving the vision, strategy, and innovation for Cloud and Edge.

Mohammad has been actively engaged with the industry and helping shape the future of cloud, NFV, and Edge for almost two decades. He is a globally-minded high-tech executive with extensive leadership experience and an inspiring leader and communicator with a proven track record of scaling organizations and cross functional teams towards a shared strategic vision.

Mohammad currently resides in The Mile High City, Denver, Colorado.

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.

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.

Vijoy Pandey is Vice President, Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) at Cisco. ET&I is chartered to create and drive the next Bold Bets businesses for Cisco in an agile, ambitious, and entrepreneurial manner. Vijoy runs product, engineering, research and a product-led growth team. He is also the CTO for Cloud at Cisco. Vijoy has held various strategy, product and engineering leadership roles and has over 20 years of expertise in planet-scale distributed systems, cloud, operational excellence, and application-first software infrastructures which serve to complement his role as a technical visionary for a software-focused digital future. Before joining Cisco, he served as Head of Engineering at Google for the company’s global cloud networks, where he was responsible for developing software systems for intent-driven automation, observability, AI/ML-based data analytics, and application-level awareness. Vijoy has held the CTO role at various companies including IBM, and Blade Network Technologies, and has led large geo-diverse, agile product and engineering teams at Blade Network Technologies, Nortel, Alteon, and Google. Vijoy has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. He currently holds over 80 patents in cloud, networking, AI/ML, and distributed systems

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.