A software engineer who believes good ideas can change the world.
Personal Mission
Open source technologies and standards are powerful enablers for sharing knowledge and providing opportunity to all peoples irrespective of economic strata. Leveraging useful technologies including open source can help reduce stress on societies and can be used to build more sustainable economies.
Alolita is interested in seeing more change and transparency in organizations and nations by leveraging open source, open standards and collaborative knowledge models. Her experience has taught her the importance of being a “knowledge bridge” to help lower barriers, to create new markets and to increase awareness of new ideas. She has worked on many projects to enable “positive change via open technologies” in the US, the Indian subcontinent, and Asia. She believes that open source, open standards, open data and content in every language, in every region can generate unbounded opportunity for learning and innovating. Adoption and development of open, innovative technologies can generate continuous economic prosperity and opportunity for everyone.
Professional Profile
At Apple, Alolita leads AIML Observability engineering. Along with building observability services for Apple scale AIML products, she and her teams contribute to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Cortex and other open source observability projects.
While at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alolita led AWS’ open source observability engineering and provided product vision for projects including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Open Metrics, Cortex, Grafana, FluentBit as well as downstream products including AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and managed services for Prometheus and Grafana. She has led open source strategy, engineering and ecosystem development for AWS search services products such as Open Distro for Elasticsearch (now known as OpenSearch). She has led open source strategy, collaboration and engineering across several technology areas including observability, search, data analytics using machine learning and NLP. She has been instrumental in establishing Amazon’s open source programs and initiatives including opensource.amazon.com and opensource.aws, aws.github.io, AWS credits program for open source projects, open source compliance, and security best practices as part of Amazon’s core open source team.
Prior to AWS, she has managed engineering teams to build web products and services for front-end features engineering, internationalization and localization framework architecture and development, NLP at organizations including IBM, PayPal, Twitter and Wikimedia Foundation. Please see her LinkedIn profile for more details.
She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science. She also completed post-graduate work towards a Ph.D in Computer Science at the George Washington University in Washington D.C.
Technology Boards and Open Standards
Alolita is an active contributor in several Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source communities. She represents Apple on the CNCF Governing Board and on the CNCF End-User Technical Advisory Board. She also co-chairs the CNCF Observability Technical Advisory Group (TAG). She serves on the governance committee of the OpenTelemetry project. She was re-elected to continue serving on the board in 2022. She is a core contributor to OpenTelemetry, a Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open-source project building an observability framework for cloud-native software. She contributes to the OpenTelemetry specification, Collector components and Go libraries. She has lead the Prometheus workgroup in OpenTelemetry to ensure interoperability and full compatibility between OpenTelemetry, OpenMetrics and Prometheus data models and metrics implementations.
Alolita has served as an officer and board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and is a passionate advocate of open source, open standards and the open web.
Alolita has served as a board director of the Unicode Consortium. Alolita believes the Unicode Consortium serves a vital role in language standardization and bridging the digital divide. She wants to see all languages fully represented on the Web and other platforms. She believes the way forward depends on the adoption of open source, open data and open standards. Unicode and standardized, open source language components like ICU, CLDR, webfonts. Alolita has also served as an invited expert on the W3C Internationalization working group and chairs the W3C Indic International Program (IIP) taskforce.
She has also served on the advisory boards of Wikitongues and the Software Freedom Law Center (India).
Open Source
Alolita contributes to the OpenTelemetry specification and leads the Prometheus workgroup in OpenTelemetry to ensure interoperability and full compatibility between OpenTelemetry, OpenMetrics and Prometheus data models and metrics implementations. She also contributes to the Collector agent and related components such as the Go instrumentation library, Prometheus Remote Write exporter, Prometheus receiver and k8s metrics related processors.
Alolita also participates in the TODO group, ASF projects like Lucene, Solr, OpenNLP as well JS projects such as GlobalizeJS.
Alolita contributes to open source language technology projects, in multilingual content communities to build languages technologies using open standards. She has been working with open source software and has promoted open source adoption for more than two decades.
Alolita co-founded India’s first open source business conference LinuxAsia in 2004 and ran the conference from 2004-2008. LinuxAsia helped establish a deep foundation for open technology innovation and collaboration across India’s top universities, central and state governments and the IT industry.
While at Wikipedia, Alolita created the Open Source Language Summit in collaboration with Red Hat to seed and accelerate development of Indic language computing tools and technology to support Indian language scripts on Wikipedia and other open platforms. The summit was held twice a year. Fall 2012 | Spring 2013 | Fall 2013
Books, Writings, Talks
Open Sources 2.0: Alolita is one of the co-authors of Open Sources 2.0 – The Continuing Evolution published by O’Reilly Media.
Linux For You (LFY): Alolita was one of the initial chief contributing editors for Linux For You (now known as Open Source For You), India’s first open source monthly magazine from 2003-2008. She also published a monthly column on technology trends in open source in LFY.
Public speaking: Alolita is a well-known speaker in US and international technology conferences. View her talks and topics.
Conference Program Committees
Linux Foundation and CNCF Conferences (including KubeCon, Open Source Summit, Open Source Leadership Summit, Helm Summit, Node+JS Interactive)
- Track Chair, Observability, KubeCon NA 2023, Chicago
- Program Committee Member, Observability Day at KubeCon NA 2023, Chicago
- Track Chair, Observability, KubeCon EU 2023, Amsterdam
- Program Committee Member, Observability Day at KubeCon EU 2023, Amsterdam
- Program Committee Member, Open Source Summit NA 2023, Vancouver, CA
- Track Chair, Observability, KubeCon NA 2022, Detroit
- Program Committee Member, KubeCon NA 2022, Detroit
- Program Committee Member, Node+JS Interactive Conference 2019, Vancouver, CA
- Program Committee Member, Helm Summit 2019, San Francisco
- Program Committee Member, 2014-2022
Apache Software Foundation Conferences
- Program Committee Member, ApacheCon 2018
Conference and Publication Profile
Bio: Alolita has built search, observability and infrastructure platforms at scale, managing diverse global teams. She currently leads Apple’s AIML observability practice and is active in multiple CNCF projects and governance initiatives. For example, she is a member of the OpenTelemetry GC, Observability TAG, CNCF Governing Board and the End User Technical Advisory Board. She also serves on various open source and standards boards.Two decades of doing open source continue to inspire her.
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