Open Source Summit NA 2025 | Jonathan Bryce, The Linux Foundation

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Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, Cloud & Infrastructure

The Linux Foundation

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play_circle_outline Explanation of the OpenInfra Foundation and its role in basic infrastructure.

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Jonathan Bryce, The Linux Foundation

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, Cloud & Infrastructure The Linux Foundation

In this exclusive interview from Open Source Summit North America 2025, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of Cloud and Infrastructure at The Linux Foundation, joins theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack the evolving dynamics of open source infrastructure and cloud-native innovation. Bryce, previously with the OpenInfra Foundation, discusses his expanded leadership role across the Linux Foundation and CNCF, highlighting new opportunities for collaboration between foundational open source communities.

The conversation explores the convergence of... Read more

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What is the professional background of Jonathan Bryce and his current role? add

What initiatives are being taken to enhance collaboration and integration among open source communities within the Linux Foundation? add

What is the role and composition of the OpenInfra Foundation, and what is its relationship to OpenStack? add

What is the relationship between cloud-native deployments and the use of OpenStack and Kubernetes? add

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Jonathan Bryce, The Linux Foundation

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Welcome back to Open Source Summit North America 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty, covering an app dev space and everything all open source. I'm joined today by Jonathan from the Linux Foundation. Jonathan, welcome.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Hi. Good to be here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, great to have you here. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Sure. I'm Jonathan Bryce. I am the Executive Director of Cloud and Infrastructure at the Linux Foundation. I have recently joined the Linux Foundation. Previously, was running the OpenInfra Foundation, where we had projects like OpenStack and Kata Containers, and others. But we merged all of that into the LF Network, and I'm now in a broader role, getting to work with even more great open source, and many more open source folks out there. Probably the most significant new piece is, I've just taken on the role of ED of CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is awesome. So just getting started there, and really looking forward to this new set of projects and people that I get to interact with.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, you have a lot of hats.

Jonathan Bryce

>> A lot of hats, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, let's start there. This new role, it's exciting, it's new. You brought a lot of things together under one umbrella. I can see how synergies make a lot of sense. Why don't you explain a little bit about this new role?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Sure. Yeah. So in addition to my role, the long time CTO of the CNCF, Chris Aniszczyk, has also stepped up as the CTO of cloud and infrastructure for the Linux Foundation overall. And what we're trying to do is, as you said, synergies, we're trying to find where the right points for integration and collaboration are across a variety of open source communities that call the Linux Foundation their home. I think what we have seen is that in the real world end users are not using just a single piece of open source software. They're always putting together a lot of different pieces. And when they do that, sometimes that works really well, sometimes it doesn't work as well. So how can we get these communities connected? How can we make sure that at the end of the day our members are able to build really tightly integrated products, and services, and take those to market, and our users have a really good experience when they are implementing these projects in production?

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, that's very cool. I mean, we look at the strategic alignment between the foundational layers here, and we talk about infrastructure as well. You mentioned OpenInfra, right?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yep.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Let's talk a little bit about OpenInfra, because maybe the audience may not be familiar with it.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Sure.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Let's talk about what that is.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, so the OpenInfra Foundation is a community of people who are responsible for, really, the basic building blocks of infrastructure, so compute, storage, and networking. And one of the ways that I like to think about our community is, our community is made up of people who are often in the data center, working with the servers, the network gear, the storage devices, figuring out how do they then expose that to the rest of their organization? Or they are service providers who have public cloud offerings that they sell in different geographies around the world. It's a really low-level technical community. OpenStack is the biggest project within OpenInfra. That's a project that started in 2010. I was actually at Rackspace and helped to create that and launch that. As that project started to take off, we created a foundation around it in 2012, which was the OpenInfra Foundation. And eventually, we brought in some other projects that are really at that infrastructure operator level.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, very cool. I mean, when we talk about the CNCF and bringing it all together here, the cloud native application layer, obviously, the underlying tech stack is kind of imperative for the cloud native layer to work. What is the relationship between OpenInfra, cloud native, and most importantly, I think the ecosystem around open source?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah. Well, cloud native, right there in the name, it needs a cloud of some kind.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure. That's true.

Jonathan Bryce

>> And a lot of times that's a hyper-scale cloud. There are many, many cloud native deployments running on top of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Ali, kind of the biggest cloud providers out there. In some cases, folks are running their own infrastructure for a variety of reasons. That might be, they want to optimize the type of hardware they have, they might want to optimize cost, they might want to meet specific regulatory requirements or geographic needs. And so in those cases, there's often another component in place. And we survey our OpenStack users, and 75 to 80% of OpenStack clouds have Kubernetes deployed on top of them. So it's a really common pattern out there for people who are running their own infrastructure, to use something like OpenStack to manage, again, those kind of basic resources in the data center.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And also harmonize them too, right?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah. And then to put Kubernetes on top to give the development teams and the rest of the organization a really nice clean API for building applications and operating those applications.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes sense. I mean, you want to have operational efficiencies. You want to make sure that you're running the best way you can run. In my practice, I cover app dev. I cover Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, and DevSecOps, build, release, and operation. Anything that touches the CI-CD pipeline and the SDLC. It's about pushing code out the door fast. And if you don't have that harmony across the entire ecosystem, there's always a breakdown. And what we don't want to see is people pointing fingers at each other and making things happen. But okay, let's take a step back. You got a new role. You have some initial priorities that you're thinking about. What are they?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Well, I've been kind of on the edges of the cloud native world for years, but definitely not deeply embedded. So my highest priority right now is really getting to know the folks here in the cloud native community, and understanding what their priorities are. I think that it's such a strong community, and it has great leaders in place, both at the technical level, as well as in the CNCF itself. So the top priority is really getting in, listening and learning, so I can know what I don't know.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure, yeah.

Jonathan Bryce

>> I definitely don't want to come in and disrupt anything. We've got a great thing going here. So that's priority one. I think another set of priorities is looking at, across these different communities, where are the right points for collaboration? And where are the right areas where we can actually have a positive sum outcome from working together? I think an early place to do that is with some of our regional communities. We have really strong OpenInfra communities in Asia, and China, and Korea, and Japan. We just had the first KubeCon in Japan. Total sellout. It was over 1500 people. Sold out on the sponsors as well. We're working on getting a bigger venue for next year for KubeCon Japan. But when we have those kinds of strong communities, what we often hear is that those are filled with end users, who again, are in the situation of, they're using Kubernetes with OpenSearch and Ceph, or they're using OpenStack with Kubernetes. And so finding ways where we can actually bring the leaders of these technologies together at once to talk to more people and give the local communities the opportunity to interact with more of the global community in an efficient way, I think, is a really clear place to start working together more closely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fair initial assessment, right? Because with a decade behind us in Kubernetes right now, really, we have an understanding of what it is and how it's working. And now it's about operational efficiencies, making things come together. So let's talk about your long-term vision. So you got the assessment of what's happening and then there's a vision out there. Where are you going with this?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Well, I think the thing that's so great about cloud native is it is not just a single technology. A lot of people, I think, associate it with Kubernetes, which was the big initiating project, and that aha moment for many people. But it's so much more than Kubernetes as well. And what it really is doing is, it's creating... You talked about operationalizing, it's creating these patterns and these technology stacks that are used to run any kind of workload, really, in a way where it's more observable, more scalable, more standard, more secure in a sense, where you can tie all those things together and get that footprint in the right state to where you know what's in there. You can have these repeatable builds, deterministic about what's going into your stack and running in production. And that is something that we've seen applied with some of the marquee users that we've highlighted over the years. And really, a lot of mobile apps, web apps, enterprise apps. As we look to the future, we want to take those patterns and those technologies and keep supporting the apps of tomorrow. Obviously, AI-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure....

Jonathan Bryce

>> we couldn't have had a conversation at a tech conference without talking about AI.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I'm surprised we made it this long to get into it.

Jonathan Bryce

>> But AI is one of those apps of the future. And it looks different than previous apps, but it's going to need those same things. We're going to need to figure out how to observe it, secure it, scale it, make sure that it's production ready. And right now, I think what we see in the timeline of AI, is many companies are now wanting to go, "Okay, I got it. AI is hyped. How is it going to make my business money?"

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely.

Jonathan Bryce

>> "How is it going to make us more efficient, increase our conversion rates? What's going to happen here?" And to do that, that also embeds AI into business processes where it becomes a business critical service, that has to run at a higher level of reliability, and have different SLAs than when we've been in the experimentation mode. So that's what the cloud native community does really well. So I think that's a huge opportunity over the next few years-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I agree....

Jonathan Bryce

>> to figure out where cloud native can help serve that. And they're going to be continued workloads like that. Telco was one before AI, now there's going to be more in the future.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So when we talk about these different approaches and we think about what organizations are running into, I agree with you, that there's not this silo running little pieces here and there. It's really a connected ecosystem to make it all work together. You touched on a number of areas that I think make a lot of sense. And you might be reiterating some of what you just said, but what does success actually look like when it's all said and done? So after you come in, you establish these kind of rules and stuff, and you say, "Hey, this is really how we're going to collaborate better and make things better," what does success look like?

Jonathan Bryce

>> I think that there are a few components of success. I think that the cloud native community has built a really awesome set of technologies, also, a really awesome set of structures and processes for the community, in terms of development and the expansion of the technology. I think what success looks like is that we see that those scale with the new needs that we face, and with the increasing number of projects and developers that are entering the community. This is, as you said, we're 10 years in, but we have more projects than ever before. And if you look at the graph of projects that are coming into the CNCF, it's growing at a really rapid pace.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's not slowing down. Yeah.

Jonathan Bryce

>> It's not slowing down. So we are a little over 200 projects today. How do we make sure that we can have a thousand?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I like that. I like that.

Jonathan Bryce

>> And along with that, that brings in new individuals.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure does.

Jonathan Bryce

>> And part of what makes a community work is when there's a sense of cohesion and culture. So your community has to be set up to absorb those new people, and to bring them in and incorporate them in a way that makes them effective, and that helps everybody move forward. And I think the cloud native community has done a great job of it. But again, it's growing really rapidly. So if we're five years down the road and we're several times larger, success is that we're still all feeling very cohesive, and aligned, and working forward and moving the state of technology forward for the industry.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think here at Open Source Summit, my kind of takeaway of the last three days, the two words I would use to describe where we're at in this community and this ecosystem, is being the ability to be dynamic and fluid, and be able to adjust to the needs of what's happening around you within the community, but also what you're trying to deliver. And that makes a lot of sense. I know you touched on a lot of this already, but I'm going to say, a year from now, we're sitting here, we're talking at Open Source Summit next year. What do you want to see happen?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Whew. Wow. Well, I think one of the things that's been kicked off this year within the cloud native space are additional KubeCons. We used to have two KubeCons a year. This year we're going to do five of them. We've added KubeCons in China, previously, and we had the first one in India last year. We're going to do that again. We had the first one in Japan this year. That's another element of the growth that we're seeing in cloud native. It's not just kind of raw numbers, but it's expanding the set of folks that are engaged in it all over the world. And I think that's been a big push. So a year from now, I would love to see even more of that, stronger global communities. To me, it's one of the most impactful things about open source, is the ability to collaborate across boundaries, whether those are companies, or countries, or communities. And that's something that I think the CNCF has been really investing in, and we're going to see big gains for that over the next year, with more people from more regions around the world engaging at a higher level.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I love that vision. That's great. That's a great way to wrap up this episode here. Congratulations on the new role. It's awesome. Thank you for joining me today. Your insights are really powerful. I think they're going to be great, and you're going to have great impact to the Linux Foundation. It's going to be awesome. I look forward to seeing what you're going to bring further?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, thank you.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I also want to thank the audience. I'm Paul Nashawaty, coming to you live from the show floor at Open Source Summit North America 2025. Thank you for watching theCUBE, the leading source in tech news.