Welcoming Abhi Vaidyanatha as the Head of Community for Plural

We are extremely excited to welcome Abhi Vaidyanatha to the team as Plural’s Head of Community. Abhi has a proven track record of fostering incredibly engaged open-source communities around great products like Airbyte and PlanetScale.

Open-source software continues to explode in popularity. Currently, 97% of organizations use some sort of open-source software in their codebases, according to an Open Source Security and Risk (OSSRA) report.

However, open-source is fragmented, hard to consume, and tricky to integrate into. During my time as the VP of Product at Unqork, I saw firsthand how time-consuming it was for engineering teams to stitch together different open-source components, patch them with updates, and inject them with tools like observability, identity management, and application security.

In fact, 88% of organizations utilize open-source components that are outdated. While open-source software brings unique value to organizations, there still isn’t a standard way to deploy or manage open-source applications.

At Plural, we’re building that standard. We’re giving organizations of all sizes a consistent and easy way to build production-grade infrastructure without requiring experts in the software itself or how it interacts with underlying technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform.

To truly build that standard, you need mind share and a consensus on how it should be done. We believe that creating a community that is excited to be part of this journey is a key part of improving the developer experience for deploying open-source applications.

Abhi is going to be an important part of that process.

Abhi was one of the first three engineers at PlanetScale, which exposed him to the beauty of solving complex problems in a cloud-native environment.

“After helping build out the backend for their first few iterations of their database-as-a-service and the open-source Vitess Kubernetes operator, I switched over to be their first content creator and developer advocate,” said Abhi. “I saw the value pretty early on being at the intersection of engineering and marketing and wanted to own that niche for open-source infrastructure.”

Abhi’s desire for building communities showed during his time at Airbyte. “As the first non-engineer hire, I got to build out all the early infrastructure for documentation, community management, and content,” he added. “By the time I finished my year there, the community had grown to  8,000 people from 1,000, with plenty of events, case studies, collaborations, and product launches under my belt.”

When Abhi first became aware of the problem we are solving at Plural, it immediately resonated with him. Through his previous experience as a software engineer, Abhi has experienced the pains of configuring and deploying various Kubernetes clusters and applications on top of them. “In the past, cloud-native infrastructure has been a mixed bag for developers,” he added. “Creating a community around the simplicity of the deployment path with Plural is going to be a big deal.”

At Plural, Abhi will be responsible for growing the community team, delivering high-quality content to the community, and perfecting the developer experience. “Everyone who’s struggling to manage Kubernetes clusters and application lifecycles should be using Plural,” he added. “I want the Plural community to be a space for discussion about all things Kubernetes, open-source, cloud-native infrastructure.”

Abhi is thrilled to be part of the team, and we couldn’t be more excited to have him lead our community. “Getting back in the cloud-native space on the ground floor again is a dream,” added Abhi.

Join us on our Discord channel for questions, discussions, and to meet the rest of the community.

If you are looking to join our team, check out our current job openings, and reach out to myself with any questions.

Ready to effortlessly deploy and operate open source applications in minutes? Get started with Plural today.