Cisco recently upped its cloud-native game by hiring Stephen Augustus as its first head of open source. Augustus wants to further mix his efforts in the open source space with Cisco’s expanding push to help its customers put those open source efforts into practice.

Augustus will be plying his expertise as an engineering director and head of open source within Cisco’s emerging technologies and incubation business. That group has wide-ranging ambitions, including solving the full-stack connectivity challenge enterprises are faced with, or as Augustus described it: “the whole idea of being able to help customers connect, secure, and automate to accelerate their digital journey.”

Augustus was previously a senior open source engineer at VMware, having been absorbed into that vendor through its acquisition of Heptio in late 2018. He is also deeply involved in the evolution of the Kubernetes project where he remains a chair of the project’s Special Interest Group (SIG) Release; continues to work with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with its events and as a contributor to projects; and co-founded the Inclusive Naming Initiative.

“This is a chance to really dig in and explore some of the things that I've learned, being part of the Kubernetes community and kind of the wider cloud-native and [Linux Foundation] community, and put that into practice internally,” Augustus said. “I think that it kind of falls in line with Cisco strategy, funny enough.”

This is where open source comes into play.

“When you build open-source communities, when you participate in open-source communities, you start to see a lot of the same patterns depending on the size and the focus, and it's the same internally for a lot of companies,” Augustus said in an interview with SDxCentral. “There are patterns that we will always notice, and you can you find ways to jump into those groups, and you find ways to do what you did before, or maybe not do what you did before.”

Within Cisco, Augustus said his role is “as connective tissue” for these initiatives and business groups. As such, he sees his position at Cisco as one of oversight more than deep coding.

“If you're moving into a new opportunity, it's not necessarily about doing all the things that you did before, it's about doing new, exciting things,” Augustus said. “Leveraging the skills that you've built over time and then also trying to do some new, exciting stuff that hopefully takes you out of your comfort zone.”

That new, exciting stuff within Cisco will obviously be associated with the vendor’s long-standing position in the networking space and history of supporting end-user use cases. Augustus said this involves connecting that history with a cloud-native mentality to support new areas in 5G, edge, and security at both the infrastructure and application levels.

He cited the ability to work with Cisco’s legacy efforts as well as its more recent acquisitions in the cloud native space, like its purchase of Banzai Cloud late last year.

“Cisco has been at the forefront of and has a reputation in the networking and the infrastructure space that are incredibly valuable for the cloud-native community, and it opens up widespread development and adoption of these future use cases,” Augustus said. “It's having these conversations on a wider level and leveraging the experience that Cisco has over decades in a lot of these spaces.”

As for where those conversations might lead, Augustus explained that supply chain security and service mesh were both top topics gaining his initial attention within Cisco, both of which could benefit from connecting projects and cloud-native developer communities that have already been established.

“The work that I will see myself spending a lot of time around is to do group. As the chair of the technical advisory group for contributor strategy on the CNCF level, what we're talking about is how to foster adoption on the personal level,” Augustus said. “These projects do not survive without people doing what can often be invisible work and we already have people doing that so why not help them to do that in the community.”