I am putting my name into the ring for TOC nominations: Alexis Richardson, CEO and co-founder of Weaveworks. I have been involved in a large number of successful open source projects in a wide range of roles. I’d like to bring that experience to the CNCF TOC. And I wish to emphasise that in ALL cases my work was part of a team effort.
The main value I bring is an understanding of how all the moving parts come together to make a project succeed, from idea to product, and from community to customer.
- CEO Weaveworks, which I co-founded. Weave is approaching 5M downloads from DockerHub and Github, and as a team we have influenced the container community and CNCF.
- CEO RabbitMQ, which I co-founded. Rabbit is widely used in cloud native software.
- Head of products for Spring and vFabric (commercial) at Pivotal where I reorganised Spring and introduced the cloud native generation of Spring products that is now doing so well (eg Boot)
- As part of the above, I was also responsible for our product effort around Redis, Apache Tomcat and Apache Web Server. I had previously convinced Salvatore (Redis) to join us. Vert.x was born in my team too.
- At VMware I was instrumental in convincing the exec team to join OpenStack. That took a while, but we got there in the end… And between VMware and Pivotal I had a proximal although never hands on role in Cloud Foundry and its journey to the current Foundation model.
- I have experience with interoperable open standards - I co-chaired and successfully brought an open cloud API standard to market - OCCI, in the OGF. I also played a leading role in AMQP through my work on RabbitMQ.
- I helped to create the MPL2 updated Mozilla open source license. And, for more info on me, please see my linkedin bio.
So why do I want to do this? I think we have a one off opportunity. Our industry is changing. Cloud computing is not a done deal - the biggest ramifications are still ahead of us. What we fumblingly call “Cloud Native” is just the little parts we can see today. Let’s make it good technology. It has to be good enough that the next generation of creative technologists want, indeed love to use it. By getting behind a Foundation we are saying that this technology should be part of the commons - something that can make the fabric of future apps, the way that HTTP made the Web.
