VMware's VP of Software Engineering Catherine McGarvey has been named Craig McLuckie's successor and chair of the Cloud Foundry Foundation's governing board. McLuckie, whose exit follows Chip Childers' departure from the role of CFF executive director, served as VMware's VP of research and development before joining the foundation.

Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) exists within the Linux Foundation, and its open source projects include Korifi, Eirini, BOSH, CredHub, and of course, the Cloud Foundry project. Used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies, this project aims to speed up and simplify the deployment and scaling of cloud-native applications.

McGarvey highlighted the value she sees in designing a platform with developers in mind, like the work CFF has been doing. "I'm thrilled to join and lead the board in our continued investment in the community," she said in a statement.

The new governing board chair plans to continue the foundation's focus on developer outcomes and fostering a community that embraces simplifying the developer experience on Kubernetes and virtual machines (VMs). McGarvey is joined by governing board members representing Gov.UK, HCL, and SAP.

CFF Program Manager Chris Clark noted McGarvey's more than ten years of involvement with the foundation prior to her appointment and her technical and managerial experience with Cloud Foundry and CFF's other open source projects.

"Her experience with Kubernetes comes at a crucial time for projects like Korifi, which are critical to the success of the community as a whole. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is pleased to welcome Catherine, with her passion and product expertise, to lead the Governing Board," Clark said.

The foundation's governing board, which responsible for oversight and management of business affairs, property, and interests, is separate from its technical oversight committee (TOC) that launched more than a year ago, replacing its project management committee. The TOC oversees the direction and delivery of technical aspects of CFF projects and supports the ability of the user community to produce open source work in a transparent and impartial way.

“The community’s focus in making these changes is to improve the transparency, improve the openness, and frankly make the open source community much more welcoming, accepting, and capable of supporting more casual contribution styles,” former CFF Executive Director Chip Childers said at the time of the TOC launch.

In addition to welcoming McGarvey as governing board chair, CFF announced the open availability of the roadmaps for a number of working groups involved with Cloud Foundry and other related projects.

This move follows the community's broader adoption of an open and inviting technical governance model in the hopes of making it simpler for new contributors to participate in the community.

"The transparency added by open roadmaps for open source projects helps engineering teams plan their feature development and focus engineering efforts," Cloud Foundry Chief Evangelist Ram Iyengar explained.

The open availability will also establish improved collaboration among the projects' consumers and promote the ability to freely contribute. "Overall, the productivity and efficiency of the community goes up while allowing engineering teams to streamline their work," Iyengar said.