Election of CNCF Operator Framework chairs

In this election, we will elect seven new chairs to replace or re-elect the existing chairs of the CNCF Operator Framework project.

See the Role of Chairs documentation for more information.

Candidates (in alphabetical order by last name)

Jonathan Berkhahn

Member of Operator Framework since: Dec. 2019

For those of you who don't know me, I'm an open source contributor for IBM and a maintainer in the Operator SDK working group. I'm also a community co-chair and plan and run the various weekly meetings of the WG. In my spare time, I build PCs and play tabletop role-playing games.

Previously I was a chair in Kubernetes SIG Service Catalog for several years. Service Catalog was a Kubernetes extension project that implemented the Open Service Broker API (OSBAPI) to provision off-cluster services. I have experience working with the larger Kubernetes/CNCF bureaucracy, as well as coordinating the engineering efforts between Service Catalog and the other SIGs. I also worked the Kubecon+CloudNativeCon circuit, regularly participating in Kubernetes governance activities, contributor summits, and recruiting new people for the SIG. I was also a voting member of the OSBAPI working group that maintained the API. I had experience working with a group of 5+ competing companies to get work done.

If elected, I would focus on increasing contributors to Operator Framework, with a focus on members of companies not already represented in the project. Long-term, I think the health of the project depends on having maintainers from as many perspectives as possible.

Lance Galletti

Member of Operator Framework since: Jun. 2019

Having Lance as an Operator Framework chair would ensure that operator authors have a voice and strong influence over the Framework’s future.

Previously an engineer on the OLM Team for 3 years, Lance now leads the Portfolio Enablement Team at Red Hat focused on furthering the maturity of the operator ecosystem. Working directly with operator owners and catalog maintainers, the Portfolio Enablement Team identifies gaps, puts forward enhancements, and delivers features to the Operator Framework in order to help operator authors deliver the highest quality operators. The team is also responsible for defining best practices and standards for the operator pattern and as such represents operator authors and the various use cases with which they use OLM. The team has contributed changes to the framework related to: bundle validation, auto-tuning of operator resources, file-based catalogs, overwrite and substitution logic for catalog maintenance, audit mechanisms to catch the use of deprecated Kube APIs and more.

Lance would help ensure that the Operator Framework addresses the real-life challenges that operator authors and catalog maintainers are facing in production.

Alex Greene

Member of Operator Framework since: May 2018

I am passionate about the Operator Framework portfolio of projects and have actively contributed to the framework for the past four years. During this time, I have proposed and implemented numerous features within the Operator Lifecycle Manager project that are widely used today, such as the ability to disable copied ClusterServiceVersions, adding webhook support to ClusterServiceVersions, allowing operators to communicate status through OperatorConditions, and more. In addition to feature development work, I have focused on fixing existing bugs, addressing performance issues, and regularly performing detailed review of pull requests submitted by members of the community.

Outside of my technical contributions, I spearheaded the initial implementation of our upstream community meetings. During this time, I organized, led, and recorded recurring public meetings which were then made available on Youtube for all to see. When I was forced to divert my attention to other projects, I identified another contributor to take over my role as the upstream community meeting organizer and they have done an incredible job since. Alongside these efforts, I have organized three of the Operator Framework’s submissions to the Kubecon Maintainers Track series of presentations, promoting exciting new features made available in the Operator Framework.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve acted as a mentor to many of the developers contributing to the Operator Lifecycle Manager project. As a mentor, I regularly meet with my mentees in an effort to keep them engaged, empowered, and most importantly happy. I hope to take these same goals and extend them to the entirety of the Operator Framework community.

Chris Johnson

Member of Operator Framework since: Jun. 2019

Chris Johnson (cdjohnson@us.ibm.com) is an IBM employee and has been working with Kubernetes since version 1.5 in various capacities and has been developing best practices and policies to deliver top notch container-native products, utilizing the Operator Framework projects as a foundation. Chris has been working heavily with the Operator Lifecycle Management community for over 2 years.

Ryan King

Member of Operator Framework since: Oct. 2021

My name is Ryan King, and I am a Senior Software Engineer on the Red Hat Operator SDK team. I would like to nominate myself for the chair position in the Operator Framework community. I have been writing and contributing to Open Source software since I was in university and think I have the right experience and skills to be a successful chair. I started programming simple games with tools like Game Maker and Unity as a kind, which started a passion for software that I still hold to this day. I received a BA in Computer Science from Boston University where I spent the latter two years of involved in a research project developing a programming language called ATS. ATS is a language in the tradition of ML (a modern equivalent would be OCaml) with a dependent type system. I think this experience in particular qualifies me for the chair role since I had to learn to balance working as a member of an institution that was supporting the project and being a member of the greater community. Doing this taught me how to correctly channel institutional power into getting positive results for the community as a whole. From there, I would go on to spend the first two and a half years of my post-grad career working on cloud native business tooling. Since most my work was internal to the company, little work was open source, but I did get opportunities to patch libraries and work on a some open source projects of my own in my free time. I would then go work for a cloud infrastructure startup that sold an enterprise Istio distribution, which, on top of great support, offered a software layer on top for multi-mesh management, handling north-south traffic, cataloging APIs, and more. It was here that I took the role of release manager for Istio 1.11. I became involved in the Istio community and worked with people from all different companies to get features finished, bugs fixed, and Istio 1.11 (and eight patch versions) shipped. Being at a startup and relying on the infrastructure of large companies for things like e2e tests showed the value that they bring to open source projects. I was also able to witness first hand how a strong community can act as rocket fuel for a project. Now, I am on the other side of that equation as a member of Red Hat's Operator SDK. I believe that my experience working on institutionally-backed open source, both inside and outside of the institution gives me the ability to see the high value in both the institution and the community. As chair, I will be tirelessly looking to find the synergy needed between Red Hat and the community in order to define an ambitious and community-driven vision for the project and use my role inside Red Hat to help execute on it efficiently. Thank you for considering me for this position.

Joe Lanford

Member of Operator Framework since: Jan. 2019

I've been a maintainer and contributor to just about all of the projects in the Operator Framework over the past 3 years.

I joined the Operator SDK team as the team lead in 2018. In that role, I helped the project join forces with Kubebuilder to align both communities, I authored the Helm operator (and much of the library code in the revamped Helm Operator Plugins project), and I led the SDK v1.0 release milestone. I also developed and currently maintain the kubectl operator plugin.

After that, I spent a year with the Operator Lifecycle Manager team building out the design and implementation of what is now known as file-based catalogs, which is a major improvement for users involved in building and maintaining catalogs of operators.

Now, I'm a Staff Engineer in Red Hat's OpenShift organization serving as the technical lead for all things Operator Framework.

In addition to my roles within the Operator Framework, I am a maintainer of the kubernetes-sigs/controller-runtime project and a reviewer for kubebuilder. I also maintain go-apidiff, which is used by a variety of projects in the Kubernetes ecosystem (and possibly elsewhere) to help Go library authors detect breaking changes in their Go APIs.

If elected, I would encourage our maintainers to have an upstream-first mindset, especially when it comes to communication and openness related to plans, designs, and progress of new features.

Technically, my focus is on simplicity, usability, and predictability. If we make Operator Framework projects easier to install, run, and interact with, we'll be able to grow our community of users and contributors another order of magnitude.

Let's make Operator Framework a name everyone in the Kubernetes community knows!

Austin Macdonald

Member of Operator Framework since: Sept. 2019

In my opinion the Operator Framework Chairs will need to leverage the strength of our sub-communities while increasing collaboration between them. I believe that means the chairs should leave almost all of the technical decisions to the greater community (usually working groups) and instead focus on processes, outreach, and fostering collaboration.

If elected, I plan to:

• continue to encourage and improve open and inclusive processes
• prioritize and coordinate outreach
• reduce barriers for new users and contributors
• catalyze the creation of a publicly visible roadmap
• revise and clarify the governance documents to fit our needs
• foster a united, welcoming culture

I have been a contributor to the Operator-SDK project for over 2 years, and I am now one of the admins for the Operator-SDK repository and one of the SDK working group leads. During my time on this project, I have consistently been an advocate for open source values.

Prior to the Operator-SDK, I worked on Pulp https://pulpproject.org/ as it transitioned from an "open source" (as in the code is on Github) to a community driven project.

I am familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of a consensus-based decision model, and I am practiced at encouraging groups to arrive at consensus without stifling the discussion.

Varsha Prasad Narsing

Member of Operator Framework since: Feb. 2020

I have been contributing to the Operator Framework community for the past 2+ years. I work closely with the Operator SDK project, and have been contributing to features related to Operator Lifecycle Manager, OF APIs and Hybrid helm. I have also been active with the SDK related community activities which involves conducting community/bug-triage/backlog meetings.

It would be a great opportunity for me to serve the community as a member of the Operator Framework Chair.

Jesus Rodriguez

Member of Operator Framework since: Mar. 2019

I am currently the team lead for the Operator SDK team which requires coordinating the team working on operator-sdk, operator-lib, as well as supporting projects like controller-runtime and kubebuilder.

I also run the weekly Java Operator's Meeting which is a working group on creating operators written in Java. There is a plugin for the operator-sdk to scaffold out a Quarkus based Java operator maintained by this group.

I often represent Operator SDK and Operator Framework in various capacities when needed; including but not limited to, conference talks, community meetings, etc.

Tony Wu

Member of Operator Framework since: Jun. 2019

Tony Wu has been working on projects related to Operator Framework over the past few years.

First worked as a Product Designer at CoreOS to design the Tectonic console, including the UX for Operator Lifecycle Manager (by then, “Application Lifecycle Manager”) project with the core engineering team in 2017. After joining Red Hat in 2018, Tony led the design for OLM UX in the OpenShift console, including the embedded OperatorHub, and the upstream OperatorHub.io debuted in 2019.

After that, Tony has been working closely with the Operator SDK team in Red Hat as a Product Manager since 2020. In this role, he participated and witnessed the progress in reducing the complexity to join the Operator Framework ecosystem through the next-gen OLM APIs and the integrations between the Operator SDK and other language plugins; as well as the efforts in maturing the Operators with reusable libraries and being able to release upgrades faster and easier in the new catalog format.

Having engineering and Human-Computer Interaction backgrounds, Tony always appreciates the works focusing on usability, learnability, and simplicity. On top of that, he believes fostering an environment that encourages open discussions is the key that leads to a solution that addresses the needs and truly brings value to the community. Tony will continually help expose Red Hat internal or partners’ feature requests to the upstream so that everyone gets the chance to participate and benefit from the community.