Individual Member Profile
Ritesh Paiboina
DEVELOP , CONTRIBUTE , INOVATE
Ritesh is a candidate in the January 2026 Board Elections .
As Chief Technology Officer of Open Telekom Cloud, I have a deep operational relationship with Open Infra through our production deployment of OpenStack as the foundation for a sovereign public cloud serving customers across Europe.
Open Telekom Cloud relies on OpenStack for core compute, storage, and networking services, and I will actively participate to upstream discussions, testing, quality and integration efforts that ensure its robustness at scale.
OpenInfra's success is critical to me because it sustains the open, interoperable standards that enable public clouds like ours to innovate, while prioritizing sovereignty, security, compliance. As an operator, community directly impacts our ability to deliver cost-effective, sovereign infrastructure amid rising AI demands.
My biggest contribution to OpenStack's success has been leading the development of private cloud features in Ericsson's Cloud Execution Environment (CEE), including scheduling/orchestration enhancements and Open Virtual Appliance deployments, alongside OPNFV Yardstick integrations for NFVI compliance verification—tools that have influenced upstream validation frameworks and helped scale OpenStack for telecom NFV use cases globally.
Contributions you can refer to https://review.opendev.org/q/owner:[email protected]
At Open Telekom Cloud, I have been leading large-scale OpenStack- and Kubernetes-based public cloud services, driving technical strategy, complex infrastructure, portfolio enablement and agile transformation across 30+ teams. This experience managing complex stakeholder interests, compliance, and long-term roadmaps prepares me well to contribute effectively and responsibly as a board member.
The OpenInfra Governing Board provides strategic and financial oversight, guiding the foundation's resources, budget, and community priorities to ensure open infrastructure thrives in success.
It balances operator needs with vendor innovation, fosters global collaboration (as seen in the 2025 Linux Foundation integration), and drives adoption of projects like OpenStack, Kata Containers and other demands.
From my operator perspective at Open Telekom Cloud, the board's success lies in sustaining neutral governance that empowers scalable and sovereign clouds.
In 2026, the Board's top priority should be accelerating sovereignty-focused open source global adoption of OpenInfra projects like OpenStack, ensuring they meet regulatory demands for data residency while scaling for AI workloads.
This means prioritizing investments that empower operators worldwide—from European sovereign clouds to emerging markets—without vendor lock-in, directly sustaining community growth and production relevance.
As CTO of Open Telekom Cloud, I see this as critical to counter proprietary alternatives and drive unified standards for secure, multi-cloud ecosystems.
