Dear CNCF Community,

As a GM and principal technical leader of cloud architecture at AT&T I have the fortune of enjoying a unique perspective through which I can observe and influence technology and its impact on our business markets, government and education sectors and on the individual consumer. My team and I are entrusted with the care and feeding of our architecture efforts toward Cloud Computing, Big Data and the consumption and providing of content and capabilities via scalable and reusable platform APIs. 

My current perspective combined with many years of driving innovation and standards through collaboration across open source and corporate and start-up initiatives has forged a strong commitment to the importance of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is from that commitment that I seek your support for a TOC nomination.

While cloud computing has held out the promise of reducing cost, complexity and time to market we have only scratched the surface of realizing these goals. In my opinion our current challenges will include not just the definition and realization of technical standards but will include the need to keep the market energized in the belief that cloud computing is still a worthy end game. With that in mind I believe our technical leadership will need to possess peripheral visionary skills and the technical grounding, historical understanding and determination to foster collaboration, prioritization and a steady cadence of accomplishments among our contributors and stakeholders.

The community tends to focus on specific technologies, tools and projects and look to understand the “either-or” value proposition of selecting one over the other. My intent would be to offer a unique and diverse perspective which recognizes our establishment of a patchwork quilt, derived from the contributions of providers, open source projects and thought leadership from a broad base of stakeholders. I would also offer a view which looks at both the provider and customer aspects of the equation and the view that innovation and change is a primary constant in our equation.

In the spirit of keeping this brief but useful I would close with the following perspective. Our ultimate business challenge is to reduce the time, cost and complexity associated with the deployment and management of software defined business and technical functions which run our lives. Our biggest technical challenge is to “right-size” the IT resources supporting today’s software enablers to point in time demand for specific functions as opposed to entire infrastructure deployments. We must accomplish this while reducing cost, complexity and time to market while offering abstraction, flexibility and choice - a tall order.

Lastly, our biggest scope challenge is in realizing software workload deployments in loosely coupled, geographically diverse architectures involving multiple providers, virtualization technologies and locations. Providing a level of visibility and control to both consumers and providers unprecedented in our technology history is imperative to maintaining comfort, confidence and adoption of the solutions we will inevitably define for the Cloud Native Computing Ecosystem.

I look forward to working with all of you in defining the direction, strategy, problem set and ultimate standards to which the industry will evolve. I would be honored to play a leadership role in this effort with the intent of uniting a diverse group of super-smart contributors to a common goal that will stand the test of time by assuring constant innovation and evolution. I appreciate your consideration.

With kind regards,

Doug

Douglas Nassaur

Lead Principal – Technical Architect

Cloud Native Computing - Architecture and Platforms

Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design

Douglas.Nassaur@...

770.331.6823