Ross Gardler

Gardler's original career was as a manager and sound engineer for a well respected though "undiscovered" Dub Reggae band in Manchester, UK called C-Charge.

This early music career lasted around eight years and ended with Ross selling the record label and management company he had created in order to return to formal education and study computer science in 1995.

This award enabled Ross to return to the UK with his now pregnant wife and focus on his open source contributions.

He was the founding Program Manager on the Azure Container Service which, in 2016 attracted Brendan Burns,[7] a co-founder of Kubernetes as lead architect.

In 2017, the container startup company Deis was acquired[8] to add significant technical strength to the team.