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San Francisco - Loft Labs, which enables any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes to hundreds or even thousands of engineers, today announced that Abby Kearns, a technology executive with deep experience in cloud-native and open-source technologies, has joined the company’s advisory board. Kearns is chief technology officer at Puppet, the industry standard for infrastructure automation. Prior to Puppet, Kearns was CEO and executive director at the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
“Abby is one of the most knowledgeable people regarding developer enablement in the cloud-native world. But besides her input regarding our strategy and roadmap, she also has a ton of practical experience as a tech leader, which makes her an invaluable mentor for me as the CEO of a fast-growing tech startup,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs. “Abby’s expertise and network will support our team while scaling up our company and we look forward to continuing and expanding our relationship with her.”
With nearly 20 years working in technology, Kearns is a veteran of the industry. Her career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies, startups and open-source foundations. At Puppet, she leads the vision and direction of the company’s enterprise product portfolio. Prior to joining Puppet, Kearns was the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation where she focused on driving the Foundation’s vision and on growing the underlying open-source project and its community. Through her tenure, Kearns built a user base that included more than half of the Fortune 500. Kearns has deep cloud experience. At Pivotal, she drove the adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and at Verizon, she led product management teams dedicated to the early days of cloud services. Her background also encompasses operations at companies such as Totality, EDS, and Sabre.
“Loft is making big waves in the cloud-native ecosystem addressing several key challenges in the space, including Kubernetes multi-tenancy and developer experience,” said Kearns. “The Loft team is innovating at a very high pace and with deep technological expertise. I am looking forward to seeing this startup succeed and I will be offering my advice on the product roadmap and other strategic decisions along this journey.”
Loft is used by platform teams in enterprises to create internal Kubernetes platforms for developing cloud-native microservices, executing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, or running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) experiments. It is also valuable in production use cases, where IT teams use Loft’s virtual clusters to surpass the scalability limits of regular Kubernetes clusters, as well as when companies need to provision full-blown demo and test environments or spin up securely-isolated instances of their managed software products.
