CoreOS added Mozilla Foundation Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker to its boards of directors as its first independent board member.

CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi said the appointment is an important step in the company’s ongoing push behind open source projects and in continuing support of the open source community.

Baker is co-founder of the Mozilla Project, and in her current role oversees “organizing and motivating” employees and volunteers at the organization. Baker had previously been at Netscape and was behind efforts to release its source code to the public in 1998.

“I’m joining the board of CoreOS because of its mission to make the Web more secure through distributed cloud-based systems and its commitment to the collaborative potential of open source development,” Baker said of her move. “CoreOS’s focus on security, distributed systems, and collaborative development is a perfect extension to my work with Mozilla.”

Since its founding nearly four years ago, CoreOS has raised about $50 million in funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Intel Capital, and Sequoia Capital. CoreOS’ current board is made up of company executives and representatives from its investors.

Polvi said Baker's interactions with CoreOS could be more than just that of a traditional board member.

“Mitchell’s commitment is primarily around the board,” said Polvi, who worked as a system administrator at the Mozilla Foundation. “But, she is almost like an executive for the company and helping out wherever needed.”

That help could include support for CoreOS in monetizing its assets while maintaining a focus on giving back to the community.

“We are really in a transition period where the first three or four years were really about category creation and helping to build the community,” Polvi explained. “As it’s matured, a big enterprise market has appeared, and that is what we are riding.”

Polvi said the company over the past six months has increased its focus on the enterprise space. Those efforts have centered on the company’s Tectonic container-orchestration product, which is based on the Kubernetes platform.

“We are at a turning point in server technology,” Polvi wrote in a blog post connected with the Baker announcement. “Right now, many companies treat server updates like the Internet Explorer ‘patch Tuesdays’ (except it’s really a patch every few months), when in reality we have the tools at our fingertips to have self-driving updates. Today, you can use Container Linux to receive automated security and software updates, as well as Tectonic, that delivers upstream Kubernetes.”

Tectonic was initially launched to support Amazon Web Services (AWS) in bare metal environments, but recently added support for Microsoft Azure and OpenStack.

“The market is blowing up and we are tasked with execution on our business model,” Polvi said. “We need to continue to go as fast as we can, but it’s on our shoulders to execute.”

Polvi said he expects a big year for the container market in terms of “true adoption and big production deployments.”

“We work with a number of customers that are not just moving into test environments, but are moving workloads,” Polvi said.