The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently changed up its leadership with Priyanka Sharma taking over from Dan Kohn as head of the Linux Foundation-based organization. The move comes at an important junction for the organization and the broader cloud native ecosystem that is becoming a bigger player in the cloud market.

Sharma's ascension comes after years inside of the ecosystem. She previously served as director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab; has been a contributor to a number of CNCF projects like Jaeger, Vitess, and a founding member of the OpenTracing standard; and began her career at Google.

“When I joined GitLab I was elected to the governing board, and that was a big turning point for me,” Sharma said. “Up until then I had become very comfortable and happy in the community, but I had no idea of the sausage-making process and the governing board position was a really nice peek into how Dan and [CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk] really built this amazingly impactful organization.”

Despite the change, Sharma said she is taking a cautious approach to the initial transition.

“One of the main goals I have in the beginning is really to do nothing,” Sharma said. “What I mean by that is that this is a very impactful organization built by a small group of people but a very large ecosystem. So it's imperative for me to hold on and listen and understand. Part of that is understanding the project process.”

Sharma said this includes “listening” calls with board members and community members to discuss whether change is needed. “Should we go slower, or should we go faster,” Sharma said on the direction of those discussions.

One area that is not likely up for discussion is CNCF refusing to accept new projects. CNCF currently houses 59 projects across various maturity models. “I can guarantee you that’s not going to happen,” Sharma said, though she added that it was a valid question.

The move is somewhat dramatic as Kohn has been the main overseer of CNCF since mid-2016. And in that time the organization has grown from an upstart under the vast Linux Foundation umbrella to a significant driver of the rapidly expanding cloud native movement.

As for Kohn, he will be launching a new Linux Foundation initiative to help public health authorities use open source software to fight COVID-19 and other epidemics.

Sharma said that she views the cloud native ecosystem as entering its “second wave, which is that now that we have adoption and awareness happening across different industries we need to go deeper and we need to educate more.”

That education has been a self-acknowledged sticking point for the Kubernetes community and broader cloud native ecosystem, which continues to operate under the notion of complexity.

“I think it’s been a fair criticism that a lot of the projects are difficult to use,” Sharma said. “You have to understand many of them came from a company building them for their own needs and then open sourcing and sharing that with the world. But by nature that means that the project that's built is going to be particularly suitable for a certain set of workflows, for a certain culture.”

To counter this, Sharma noted that a number of vendors have stepped in to ease the complexity issue of CNCF projects. And for CNCF leadership itself, she explained that the organization needs to continue to foster a neutral environment for those vendors to bring these benefits in a manner that continues to serve the open source community.

“So when I say that we got to go deeper into developer education and engagement I don't mean like supplant training businesses worldwide,” Sharma said. “What I mean is to enable them further. Spend a lot more time talking to end users and the developers there to just surface their needs.”