Wido den Hollander Voted as VP of Apache CloudStack
The Apache Software Foundation community has voted Wido den Hollander as the new Vice President of Apache CloudStack. A long-time PMC member and contributor, Wido has been working on CloudStack for over 15 years, bringing deep technical experience and real-world operational insight from the cloud industry. This blog shares key snippets from Wido’s first interview since being voted CloudStack VP for 2026.
Getting started with CloudStack
Wido’s journey into CloudStack is rooted in practical experience. He has been active in the hosting industry since 2004, building and operating infrastructure for over two decades.
“I've been in the hosting and IT industry since 2004, so it's about 23 years now. My background is hosting and I've been a user, a contributor, and PMC member, and actually a VP member before of the Apache CloudStack project.”
His introduction to CloudStack came from a need to move beyond custom-built infrastructure:
“I always ran a web hosting company... during that journey we had our KVM environment built with bash scripts, and we looked for something else. This is when I stumbled upon what was cloud.com from citrix, which was about to be donated to the Apache Software Foundation. So, through that journey we started adopting Apache CloudStack in my hosting company and we have been using it ever since.”
Wido’s first contribution dates back to 2011, focusing on improving packaging:
“My first contribution to the project was actually an improvement in the Debian and Ubuntu packaging... I sent my first patches to improve the packaging for Ubuntu.”
Perspective on the CloudStack project
Over the years, he has remained deeply involved in both development and governance. His appointment as VP reflects this long-standing commitment.
“I would say the VP is somebody who keeps everybody together, talks with the ASF, is the face of the project for a year.”
A key theme in Wido’s perspective is reliability:
“CloudStack is a reliable foundation to build your company upon. There have been many great features, bugs have been resolved, enhancements in CloudStack. But the main thing is it is reliable”.
He also highlights governance as a critical differentiator:
“The governance of the ASF - that's a truly reliable foundation to run your company upon.”
Evolution for the technology
Looking ahead, Wido sees CloudStack continuing to evolve:
“I think it's going to be evolutions within CloudStack. We are quite feature-ready If you look at IaaS, there are a few upcoming features I am looking forward to. For example, the DNS provider where you can manage DNS from CloudStack. So, you have a single environment where you can manage VMs, object storage, and then also DNS connected to different providers. And I would like to personally investigate a possibility where we can get some telemetry back to the project on an opt-in basis.”
Importantly, Wido wants to challenge the perception that CloudStack is only for large-scale deployments:
“CloudStack still seems like this giant monster for some people. That's a myth I would like to bust, because even with just a few servers, you could have a great Apache CloudStack deployment.”
He reinforces this with a real-world example of a compact deployment that still delivers enterprise-grade features.
Community
Wido is also passionate about community:
“The culture should be that everybody is welcome and we should respect everybody and be grateful for anything somebody contributes.”
He encourages new contributors to get involved:
“We should be open to anybody submitting a pull request in GitHub. What I heard from feedback from some developers is that it sometimes feels very scary to send your first pull request to a GitHub project which has been around for 15 years and then you come along from somewhere on this planet and you send your first pull request. You're like, oh, what's going to happen? Are they going to be angry with me if I make a mistake? No, everybody should be welcome to open their first PR.”
Growth
Despite often operating behind the scenes, CloudStack continues to grow:
“It is still growing, yes. And I think that is a misconception which sometimes exists because CloudStack just is there as an IaaS, powering these enormous environments, but also many smaller environments. But it's taken for granted by so many people. So, it's no longer in the really big hype cycle. As I said, there's evolutions, no longer revolutions.”
Wido concludes with a message to the community:
“I want to thank everybody for contributing, for being part of the project. I would like to encourage everybody to contribute more and new users to step into the community, be active, stand up, and you are more than welcome to send in contributions which can be documentation, pull requests for code. But be at events, be vocal, or just help somebody on the mailing lists.”