The Architecture Committee (AC) is composed of five members, who are elected by contributors. The AC elections take place every six months, in February (two seats available) and in September (three seats available). The AC is responsible for architectural decisions, including standardization, and making final decisions if Maintainers disagree.

For the September 2021 Kata Containers Architecture Committee elections, we had three seats available. Please welcome back Archana Shinde, Eric Ernst, and Fabiano Fidêncio as returning members to the Kata AC. Congratulations to all of you!

Archana Shinde, Intel

Archana is a software engineer at Intel working on open source technologies for cloud and has been an active contributor to the Kata Containers project since the beginning. She has been engaged in various aspects of the project from the initial design to driving its adoption in production use cases. She has also served as a member of the Kata architecture committee in the last term. She will continue to be active in engaging with various organizations interested in evaluating Kata Containers, helping them onboard, and making sure Kata meets their production use case requirements.

Eric Ernst, Apple

Eric is a senior software engineer at Apple, focused on cloud infrastructure. Since the initial discussions of creating Kata started, he has been an active contributor and advocate for the project, both in code and in the greater Kata community and ecosystem. Over the last couple of years, he has served as a member of the Kata Containers Architecture Committee. Before Kata, he spent time working on Clear Containers, and prior to that spent a few years working on Linux kernel.

Fabiano Fidêncio, Red Hat

Fabiano is a senior software engineer working for Red Hat’s virtualization team. In the last year, he has dedicated his professional and personal time contributing to the Kata Containers project and community, with a strong focus on helping Red Hat to build a product from the Kata Containers project. In the community, he also has helped on a lot of different parts of the project including connecting people to solve their problems, mentoring both newcomers and students into the Kata community, leading Architecture Committee meetings, leading the last vPTG’s Kata Containers session, and more. As a current Kata architecture committee member. he will continue to increase Kata Containers adoption in the industry while ensuring the project is stable and easily consumable.

The complete slate of candidates represented five leaders from four different companies, a reflection of the growth of the Kata Containers project since it was formally announced in December 2017. The current Kata Containers Architecture Committee is composed of five members: Archana Shinde, Eric Ernst, Fabiano Fidêncio, Samuel Ortiz, and Tao Peng.

We want to extend our congratulations to the new Architecture Committee members, and also say thanks to everyone who participated in the election. Governance by community-elected officials is one of the cornerstones of the Four Opens, and is a major step forward in the maturation of Kata Containers.

Please visit the Kata Containers’ website for more information about how Kata Containers can build lightweight virtual machines that seamlessly plug into the containers ecosystem. You can also explore Kata Containers on GitHub and get involved! Connect with the community via Slack or OFTC IRC: #kata-dev and #kata-general, Mailing List, Weekly meetings and Twitter.