Changing of the guard at Cloud Foundry: CTO made executive director, VMware veep becomes chairman of the board

Cloud Foundry, home of open-source projects that simplify development and deployment of cloud-native applications, has named former CTO Chip Childers as exec director and VMware's Paul Fazzone as board chair.

The previous exec director, Abby Kearns, had been in the role since November 2016. She has accepted an "executive role elsewhere," according to the announcement.

Childers has been CTO since January 2015 and therefore has deep knowledge of Cloud Foundry's technology. The key challenge in recent years has been the transition to running on Kubernetes, as Childers described to The Reg here. The foundation recently adopted KubeCF, a project led by SUSE, to bolster its Kubernetes support.

Childers marked his appointment by posting on Twitter a part of his note to the Cloud Foundry community, focused on the role of open source in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"National governments have used the Cloud Foundry platform to rapidly build, deploy and scale software that is helping their citizens get information and register for economic support," he said. "These responses have required actions measured in days and hours, not weeks and months. The collective impact of open source software is and has made possible so many things that would have been impossible only a few years ago."

The most prominent user of Cloud Foundry technology is VMware, and specifically the part of VMware that used to be Pivotal before it was acquired (or re-acquired) in January. The Pivotal Application Service is now part of VMware's Tanzu initiative, which puts the focus on deploying applications to Kubernetes rather than running up VMs. No surprise then that it is Paul Fazzone, SVP of Tanzu R&D, who now steps up as chairman at Cloud Foundry.

Fazzone said: "This next chapter for Cloud Foundry will be a shift forward in focusing on evolving the technology to a Kubernetes-based platform," almost as if that had not already been happening. He is replacing Dell EMC global CTO John Roese, who remains on the Cloud Foundry board.

Other companies that make extensive use of the Cloud Foundry platform include IBM, SAP and SUSE. It is also supported by public cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google. ®