Priyanka Sharma could be excused for feeling daunted when she became general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in June 2020. She’d been involved with the organization for years, but her assumption of the top role came at an unexpectedly difficult moment. The COVID-19 pandemic posed an existential threat to the CNCF’s popular KubeCon, an annual Kubernetes conference typically attended by tens of thousands of people. And that July, Google, a founding member of the CNCF, raised eyebrows when it decided not to transfer control of a state-of-the-art piece of open-source container technology called Istio to the foundation.
