My cloud-native journey began in earnest in 2012 when my boss at the time, Tom Maguire, asked me to start looking into this PaaS (Platform as a Service) thing. As a member of the Architecture group in the EMC CTO office, looking at emerging technology was not new for us—but boy, did this one pan out! I will forever be grateful to Tom for the impetus and for giving me the space to explore.
By early 2013, I had learned enough to know that this was the space for me to work in for the foreseeable future, and with the creation of Pivotal Software, I had a place to do that work. I have Elisabeth Hendrickson to thank, first for welcoming me to the Cloud Foundry party—even while I was still at EMC—and for introducing me to James Watters. I often say that the best career move I ever made was going to work for James. I thank him for the many opportunities that he presented me, for trusting me in a way that allowed me to do my best work, for countless high-bandwidth conversations in which we collectively learned about this cloud-native thing, and for the deep friendship we’ve created over the last six years.