Priyanka Sharma, the director of Cloud Native Alliances at GitLab, has joined CNCF as its new general manager. Priyanka takes over the leadership of CNCF from Dan Kohn, who will be launching a new Linux Foundation initiative to help public health authorities use open source software to fight COVID-19 and other epidemics.

Kohn will continue to participate in several CNCF activities and CNCF’s CTO Chris Aniszczyk will continue in his role.

“The Linux Foundation is excited to bring on Priyanka Sharma, a long-time open source leader with wide knowledge and connections in our industry, as the general manager of CNCF,” said Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. “Priyanka will work closely with business and technology leadership of CNCF, which represents the whole technology industry, to continue building the cloud native ecosystem.”

Priyanka has contributed to several CNCF projects such as Jaeger and Vitess and was a founding team member of the OpenTracing standard.

Talking about her new role, Sharma said: “With our lives changed by a global pandemic, the world needs more and even better digital experiences and technology tools. As the new general manager of the CNCF, I am committed to supporting this second wave of technology innovation that is transforming human lives with continued growth and adoption of cloud native technologies.”

“Priyanka’s contributions to CNCF as a speaker, governing board member, and community leader over the last several years have been invaluable,” added Kohn. “I think she is a great choice to lead the organization to its next stage.”

For the uninitiated, Sharma launched LightStep out of stealth with a Series B funding from Sequoia Capital and marquee customers such as Twilio, Lyft, GitHub, and DigitalOcean.

Moreover, she is a leading speaker and subject matter expert on cloud native and observability and has spoken about Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, OpenTracing, Envoy, Vitess, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and more. Sharma was also a startup founder featured at TechCrunch Disrupt and started her career at Google.

GitLab’s Priyanka Sharma Talks About Multi-cloud Maturity Model