Welcome our new and returning Architecture Committee members!

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 2020 Kata Containers Architecture Committee elections, we had three seats available. Please welcome back Eric Ernst as a returning member and new members Archana Shinde and Fabiano Fidêncio to the Kata AC. Congratulations all of you!

• 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 two 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.

• Archana Shinde, Intel

Archana is a software engineer at Intel working on Cloud technologies 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. Over the years, she has played an active role in contributing towards the project code base as well as advocating the project in the greater open source community at various container events.

• Fabiano Fidêncio, Red Hat

Fabiano is a senior software engineer working for Red Hat’s virtualization team. His involvement with Kata Containers ranges from providing simple patches, doing code reviews on pretty much all components, fixing issues not only on Kata Containers but also in the communities surrounding the project, to becoming a point of contact for Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL related issues, always focusing on what could benefit the project and its community. To keep improving Kata Containers’ adoption, he recently became the CRI-O maintainer for the VM runtime type (used together with the "shim v2").

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 Xu Wang.

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 IRC Freenode: #kata-dev, Mailing List, Weekly meetings and Twitter.