CNCF Formally Convenes End User Technical Advisory Board
The End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) was formally introduced this week at the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference and chartered with providing feedback from organizations that have adopted open source software developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Co-chaired by Alolita Sharma, lead for applying machine learning/artificial intelligence for observability at Apple, and Henrik Blixt, a leader of a project management team at Intuit, the End User TAB promises to serve as the voice of the end user community.
The goal is to complete a virtuous feedback cycle that will enable CNCF projects to better prioritize which capabilities need to be added first based on the issues enterprise IT organizations are encountering, Sharma told conference attendees.
Other members of the End User TAB include Amr Abdelhalem, head of cloud platforms for Fidelity Investments; Aparna Subramanian, director of production engineering for Shopify; Chad Beaudin, chief engineer for Boeing; Dave Zolotusky, a platform engineer at Spotify; Garry Cairns, a lead engineer for JPMorgan Chase; Joseph Sandoval, a principal product manager for Adobe; Katie Gamanji, a senior Kubernetes filed engineer for Apple; Mario Constanti, a software engineer for Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation; Mike Bowen, senior principal engineer for BlackRock; Ricardo Rocha, platform infrastructure lead for CERN; and Sergiu Petean, head of DevOps for Allianz Direct.
The End User TAB is being formed as Kubernetes, the best known of the hundreds of projects that CNCF stewards, approaches its 10th anniversary next month. While the adoption of Kubernetes continues to steadily increase, the number of developers building cloud-native applications for this platform remains limited. There are millions of developers who resist building applications that require them to know a lot more about how the underlying platform functions. Historically, developers rely on frameworks that abstract away much of the underlying infrastructure. As a result, the pace at which cloud-native applications are being developed and deployed is being constrained.
The irony is that Kubernetes was originally espoused as a platform for building applications by developers with full-stack expertise. The issue is that the number of developers capable of managing the entire stack remains relatively small. Now, IT operations teams have embraced Kubernetes to better centralize the management of IT operations, but there is still a need to make the platform more accessible to millions more potential developers.
Theoretically, the End User TAB should help the various technical oversight committees overseeing various CNCF projects gain more visibility into these and other challenges that IT teams that have deployed Kubernetes and other software developed under the auspices of the CNCF are facing. Much of that software is initially developed by vendors looking to the CNCF to help spur further adoption.
Despite these challenges, Kubernetes and other CNCF projects, such as OpenTelemetry, are emerging as de facto standards. The challenge the CNCF faces now is ensuring that all the other projects it supports find similar success. None of that will happen, however, without strong enterprise IT advocates willing to support the adoption of software that typically requires months, sometimes years, to mature.
