DigitalOcean – the cloud for developing modern apps has elected Barry Cooks as its new chief technology officer (CTO). Under this role, Cooks will be responsible for the company’s overall product direction & development and assist the engineering, product and infrastructure teams. “DigitalOcean has built a reputation for offering the easiest developer experience for deploying apps in the cloud, and as a result, we have cultivated a passionate community of more than 3.5 million advocates. Barry’s leadership will be key as we continue to serve these developers and address the growing needs of small and midsize businesses, all while upholding the highest levels of simplicity, community and support in the industry,” professes Mark Templeton, CEO, DigitalOcean.

Based out of San Francisco, Cooks pursued M.S and B.S in Computer Science from University of Oregon and Purdue University. Former VMware associate (VP - R&D) brings-in 20+ years of expertise (software, systems and product development) to DigitalOcean including hardware, software engineering, product management, support and quality assurance.

Barry’s leadership will be key as we continue to serve these developers and address the growing needs of small and midsize businesses, all while upholding the highest levels of simplicity, community and support in the industry,

Prior to VMware, Cooks worked as senior vice president of products, engineering and support at Virtual Instruments, and director of engineering at Sun Microsystems.

However, his appointment comes on the heels of other strategic additions to DigitalOcean’s leadership team. Jeff Giannetti and Anthony Ricco was appointed as chief customer officer and chief marketing officer (in December) respectively whereas Mike Cristinziano joined the company’s executive team as senior vice president of strategy and corporate development (October 2018).

On joining Cooks said, “By simplifying cloud infrastructure and removing the obstacles developers face, DigitalOcean has made a name for itself in the developer community. It is an honor to join this incredibly smart and passionate team, and to partner with such great leadership so we can further advance the platform and deliver even more value to developers and our growing number of business customers. By combining the advantages of open source with our focus on simplicity, we can empower even more developers to build modern apps”.