Linux Foundation Appoints Jonathan Bryce to Lead CNCF

DENVER — At the Open Source Summit North America, the Linux Foundation announced two major leadership appointments to oversee its rapidly expanding cloud infrastructure initiatives. Jonathan Bryce, who’s also the Executive Director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra), will also take on the role of Executive Director of the LF’s Cloud & Infrastructure, while Chris Aniszczyk, a longtime open source executive and technologist, has been named CTO for Cloud and Infrastructure.

Bryce, who played a central role in the recent merger of the OpenInfra Foundation with the Linux Foundation, will now guide the strategic direction of cloud and infrastructure projects under the LF umbrella. This makes him, in effect, the Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Priyanka Sharma, who served as the CNCF’s Executive Director for five years, stepped down in June 2025. In this new role, though, Bryce will also oversee other Linux Foundation cloud and infrastructure projects such as Cloud Foundry.

CNCF and OpenInfra

That does not mean, Bryce explained in an interview, that OpenInfra is going to be merged into the Linux Foundation or the CNCF. “They’re going to stay separate; separate boards, staff, and budgets.” He’ll be able to do this because, “On the OpenInfra side, we’ve been building a strong leadership team there, with Thierry Carrez, who’s the GM, and he’s been running the day-to-day for about two years now. And then we have Wes Wilson and Allison Price, who are both super strong leaders.” He continued, “I’ll still be very involved in the overall strategy and priorities.”

Looking ahead, Bryce also said he doesn’t see the CNCF and OpenInfa ever merging. “Never say never. But it’s definitely not the plan right now. I think one of the things that is really important when you’re working with open source projects and communities is understanding who makes up a community, right, and there’s a lot of overlap between CNCF and OpenInfra, but there are also some areas of differentiation.”

Aniszczyk, who has served as VP of Developer Relations at the Linux Foundation and CTO of the CNCF, brings deep technical expertise and a proven track record in building and scaling open source communities. His leadership will focus on driving innovation, technical excellence, and community engagement across the LF’s cloud infrastructure portfolio.

Looking ahead, the two agree that cloud native computing’s biggest challenge is meeting the demands of AI. Bryce said, “We have to continue to make improvements in the usability of these core projects like OpenStack and Kubernetes and OpenSearch and on and on to make sure that they are adapting and integrating for the next wave/ AI, it’s not just a hype cycle. We need an AI strategy to figure out how they’re going to run AI, how they’re going to secure it, and how they’re going to keep it available for business-critical use cases.”

Open Source Challenges

That’s daunting, but Bryce continued, “We’ve seen this before. I think the first one that I saw like this was the telecom industry shift to OpenStack and other cloud technologies. True, the AI stack is different. A GPU cloud doesn’t look like a bunch of servers that each one has CPU, Memory, Disk, and network in them. They have hundreds and thousands of cores in them with special networking and memory. How do you schedule it? How do you observe it? But we’ve done it before, and I think that with the amazing power of open source communities, we’ll meet these challenges.

The appointments come at a pivotal moment for the Linux Foundation, which continues to expand its influence in open source technology, cloud computing, and infrastructure. The integration of OpenInfra’s projects and community is expected to accelerate collaboration and growth in open cloud infrastructure, reinforcing the LF’s mission to enable mass innovation through open source.

The pair, who only live a few miles apart in Austin, Texas, look forward to working together. Mind you, that requires them to be both home at the same time.  As Aniszczyk wryly mentioned, ” I’ve been pretty crazy with traveling to Japan and China, and then ping ponging around India in about a month and a half, but when we’re together we’ll get it done.”