Q&A: Mark Kropf, VMware

As we head into the final stretch before our first Cloud Foundry Summit in Europe, we thought it would be a good opportunity to get to know some of the speakers who will be on stage. First up is Mark Kropf, Director of Product Management at VMware. Mark’s talk is titled “Cloud Foundry for Windows Developers.”

How did you get involved in Cloud Foundry?

While working at Diebold, Inc. in 2011, I encountered the work that was being done on the first version of CloudFoundry at VMware and decided to market it to our retail banking customers for a branch transformation project. Shortly after when Bosh was born, I quickly had my team using bosh to deploy all the things in our R&D org. After that when I heard that Cloud Foundry had grown into VMware, I knew I had to be a part of making Cloud Foundry the PaaS standard. Feels like being a part of Linux in the early years.

What are you speaking about at Cloud Foundry Summit Berlin?

In Berlin I’ll be speaking about the great work our Windows Container team (Greenhouse) has been doing in close collaboration with Centurylink and HP. We’re really excited about this release since it’s the first time there will be first class support for windows workloads in Cloud Foundry.

What do you hope people will learn from your talk?

I’m hoping the greater Cloud Foundry ecosystem will learn about how .NET devs can now begin developing cloud native apps targeting Cloud Foundry. I’m eager to bring the very large community of .NET developers out there and introduce them to Cloud Foundry. We’ll also highlight the history of the different Windows ports that got this effort started, and a hint of where we’ll be going partnering directly with Microsoft to ensure that Cloud Foundry devs have the support they need for their .NET apps.

What excites you about being part of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem?

From the moment I first saw a demo of early v1 cloud foundry in 2011 at VMware I realized that this was going give birth to a new paradigm of software development. Finally developers can move on from having to worry about crafting their own OS, image, container, etc, and just focus on delivering killer apps that drive their business forward. I’m thrilled to be a part of introducing the next level of automation into the software development ecosystem that will drive the velocity of change for the foreseeable future.