Jonah Kowall trained in computer science and co-founded one of the first content filtering companies in the late 1990s. Focused on security, committing code to the FreeBSD project and building the first wireless cracking algorithms. Earning a CCIE, CISSP and CISA along with several infrastructure-related certifications. Throughout 15 years as a practitioner and manager across both startups and large enterprises focusing on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. Spearheading both tactical and strategic operational initiatives, going deep into observing, monitoring and tuning of infrastructure and applications.
In 2011 Jonah changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM). Speaking and writing research globally for IT leaders and CIOs. Jonah led Gartner’s influential application performance monitoring (APM) Magic Quadrant and created the network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) Magic Quadrant, along with creating the Network Packet Broker (NPB) term and market.
Along with this change, Jonah moved to Miami, Florida where the weather is warm, and the water is inviting, building an avid love for oceans, especially scuba diving. Jonah is underwater weekly exploring reefs and shipwrecks around the work in with both recreational and technical diving. For the latest diving photos, see https://instagram.com/jkowall.
In 2015 Jonah began building products, firstly Joining AppDynamics to drive the company’s corporate development, product strategy, and vision. Creating new products and solutions with technical partners, including IBM, SAP, and ServiceNow. Cisco acquired AppDynamics for $3.8b in 2017 to create IT and business alignment.
After a successful exit, Jonah then started running product and engineering efforts at startups. The first was Kentik, a leader in SaaS-based network analytics for network professionals. Later joining Logz.io to serve the same CTO function in building the industry’s first open source-based SaaS observability solution.
In 2022 Jonah moved to Aiven seeing the opportunity for a broader open-source based SaaS solution for data platforms encompassing databases, streaming, and ultimately a fully featured and portable platform. The contributions to open source continue as Jonah is a regular contributor to CNCF projects including OpenTelemetry, Fluent Bit, and a maintainer of Jaeger, the most popular distributed tracing project today.
How will you contribute to the board
Jonah’s experience as a leader in open source projects and businesses leveraging and contributing back to open source communities allows him to provide a unique perspective. Jonah has active participation as a member of the advisory board of the OpenSearch project, and is a maintainer of the CNCF project Jaeger. With connections back to these important projects and foundation, a unique perspective will be gained to the board as a practitioner and product leader.
Jonah contributes both in written content, discussions, and steering to ensure open source software thrives and is safe from organizational hijacking of the community and technology. Jonah is often speaking, evangelizing and protecting an open community, allowing for open source to always have a future in computing.
Why you should be elected
Having worked as a practitioner for over 15 years, and a long history of contributing, building, and creating businesses around open source Jonah brings a view of the technology. These views include the perspective not only as a practitioner, contributor and maintainer, but understanding the user perspective along with the business perspective.
Creating communities and encouraging and running mentorship programs is part of keeping open source alive. This is something we all must do to create the future ability for people to rely on open source projects.
Having worked closely with OSPOs at multiple companies, I believe there is more that we can do to ensure that corporations are participating and investing in open source to ensure viability and visibility.