Ambassadors

DevOps & Cloud Engineer, Public Speaker, Tech Mentor, Lead Organizer CNCG Jaipur, OpenSource & Community Contributor, AWS Community Builder, AWS Community Leader, 1 x (AWS, GCP, Azure), 6 x RedHat, CKA, KCNA certified.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It’s been more than three years, I am being part of CNCF programs actively contributing via blogs, and public speaking on different open source DevOps/Cloud technologies at virtual and in-person events, I want to expand my learning and contribution with a wide area of peoples and uplift them with like-minded folks I can grow at the same time can share & help with my ideas to build better community bonding & culture.

Ali is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he focuses on developing and contributing to open-source software. He has a strong track record of contributions to various projects, communities, and foundations, and he is currently an active contributor to the Knative project. In addition to his technical contributions, Ali is also deeply committed to mentoring and promoting contributor growth within the CNCF community. He plays an active role in the Google Summer of Code program at CNCF, where he serves as an admin. He is also a frequent speaker on topics such as starting to contribute to open-source software and the projects he is working on.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador is an exciting opportunity for me to expand my reach and impact within the community. As someone who is already involved in mentoring and contributor growth activities at CNCF, I’m eager to use the ambassador title to promote CNCF technologies, open-source software, and help interested individuals get started with contributing to CNCF projects. Additionally, being part of a network of other CNCF Ambassadors will allow me to collaborate and share ideas with like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same things. I’m excited to be part of this community and look forward to making a meaningful impact.

I am a Brazilian software engineer with focus on Cloud Native and Free and Open-Source Software and have been contributing to the Kubernetes community since 2020 mainly on SIG-Network and SIG-Windows initiatives. My writings and notes can be find here: http://opssec.in/.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Is a great honor to have the opportunity on collaborate and increase the community, I am very excited to be part and advocate in favor of this big community.

Angel Ramirez is a Kubernetes Certified Administrator (CKA) and curator of the Kubernetes CKA exam, with expertise in cloud computing, infrastructure, cloud and software architecture, DevOps, security, team building, leadership, and community building. With over a decade of experience in the industry, Angel is a skilled practitioner and evangelist of cloud native technologies. Angel has founded the Hispanic Foundation of Cloud Native, which aims to empower the Spanish-speaking community to adopt cloud native technologies, and currently runs two Kubernetes community chapters with over 1500 members, making him a valuable asset and true Kubernetes Ambassador. https://www.youtube.com/@fhcn https://community.cncf.io/kcd-colombia/ https://community.cncf.io/medellin/ https://community.cncf.io/south-florida/ https://www.meetup.com/lahoradekubernetes/ https://www.meetup.com/kubernetes-and-cloud-native-south-florida/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVCT1t69BF4&list=PLKR8WO9E9BlM_22CmbvsiBlWsXQK9l9R5

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As the Kubernetes Ambassador, I am particularly excited to help the LATAM and Hispanic communities learn and adopt Cloud Native and Kubernetes. Cloud native technologies have the power to transform businesses and individuals alike, and I am passionate about sharing this potential with as many people as possible. By empowering the community to embrace these technologies, we can create a more equitable and prosperous future for everyone. I am honored to have this opportunity to make a difference in the lives of so many people.

Barun likes hacking on low level stuff and fiddling around developer toolings. He maintains KubeArmor, a CNCF Sandbox project and currently works as a Software Engineer at Accuknox. He loves to talk about Open Source and has been associated with programs like Google Summer of Code and LFX Mentorship. Find his blogs at https://barun.cc

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador has heightened my enthusiasm to further promote, educate, and support the cloud-native community. Leveraging my prior experience as a speaker and maintainer, I am now even better positioned to advocate for and strengthen the ecosystem through advocacy and knowledge sharing.

Eric is Chronosphere’s Director Evangelism. He’s renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author and baseball expert. His current role allows him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies and organizations. Follow on https://www.schabell.org.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to officially have the title of ambassador as I’ve been actively promoting a lot of the work they do for over a decade now.

I am a cloud native believer and advocator with over 15 years of experience in cloud computing. I was an early contributor to Kubernetes and led its adoption at eBay for six years. I am currently working as a product and development owner of cloud native FinOps at Tencent Cloud, where I founded the open-source project Crane, which helps users optimize their cloud costs. I am also auther of “The Journey of Kubernetes Production Adoption Success”, translator of “Cloud FinOps”, and speaker on various cloud native topics including Cloud Native Campus in geektime.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador because I love cloud native and I want to share my passion and knowledge with others. I think cloud native is the future of software development and it can bring many benefits to users, developers, and businesses. I want to help the cloud native community grow and thrive by contributing to open-source projects, writing books and articles, and organizing events. Being an ambassador will give me more opportunities to connect with other cloud native enthusiasts and learn from their experiences. I hope to inspire more people to join the cloud native journey and make a positive impact on the world.

Josh is passionate about enabling project builders and end users to succeed with cloud computing. He’s a solution architect for Red Hat and leader of CNCF’s TAG App Delivery and WG Platforms. He also leads the CNCF Chicago community group and other Chicago-area groups. Check out Josh’s blog at https://blog.joshgav.com/!

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to continue enabling beginners and experts alike to make the most of cloud computing! As an ambassador I’ll be even more empowered to educate and support Chicago-area developers in our local communities. I’m looking forward to sharing knowledge myself, but most of all I’m looking forward to enabling people in my communities to share their knowledge with each other!

Co-founder of the Nordic meetup alliance, Cloud Native Nordics, where he also organize the Aarhus group, and tries to help the nordic community as much as possible, e.g. setting up KCDs and more. He works as Lead Platform Architect at Lunar where he in the past has shared many experiences with Cloud Native tech at meetups and conferences. Kasper wrote his master thesis, “KubeCloud – A Small Scale Cloud Computing Environment”, on how Universities could leverage small-scale cloud environments built out of Raspberry Pis running Kubernetes.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador, because it’s a great community of like-minded people. I hope to meet and learn from the other awesome Ambassadors, and help grow the adoption of Cloud Native technologies even more here in the Nordics.

Kunal is empowering communities via open-source and education. He finds passion in teaching and has taught thousands of folks online and in person. He is a developer relations manager at Civo, CNCF Ambassador, TEDx speaker and a GitHub Star. He is the founder of WeMakeDevs and also started the official Cloud Native Student Community group joined by thousands of folks, focussed on getting more young people involved in the ecosystem. In the past he has been a track chair of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Major League Hacking Coach and a Google Summer of Code mentor with Red Hat. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/KunalKushwaha Blog: https://blog.wemakedevs.org Community: https://wemakedevs.org

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am a strong believer in the importance of diversity and inclusion, particularly in the field of cloud native technology. My goal has always been to facilitate the learning and onboarding process for individuals interested in this ecosystem. Therefore, I believe that becoming a CNCF Ambassador would be a significant step towards achieving this objective.

Mario is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He works on container-based developer tools. He co-maintains the CNCF Devfile project and leads the Eclipse Che project. He has been a speaker at conferences such as KubeCon, LinuxCon, JavaOne and FOSDEM.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be part of the CNCF ambassador program because that will help share my knowledge and my experience as a developer using and developing Kubernetes with others. I am also looking forward to meet with other ambassadors.

Márk is a SWE/SRE from Hungary with years of experience in various Cloud Native technologies as well as contributing to and maintaining Open Source Software. He is one of the core maintainers of Dex, a Cloud Native identity federation solution and a number of Go libraries (Viper being the most prominent among them). Márk also organizes several tech meetups in Hungary (Go Budapest, Kubernetes and Cloud Native Budapest, Microservices Budapest) and regularly appears as a speaker in the region at meetups, workshops, conferences and podcasts. You can occasionally find him posting to his blog (https://sagikazarmark.hu/), but chances are his GitHub profile is more interesting. In his free time, Márk likes riding a bicycle, reading books, but his favorite hobby for more than 20 years has been Hungarian folk dance.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I always liked learning/building new technologies and then sharing the knowledge with others. By working on various Open Source projects for more than a decade I also learned to appreciate the opportunity to learn from people coming from different backgrounds. By being an ambassador I hope that I’ll have more opportunities to connect with people, learn from them and maybe share some of my knowledge as well.

I am an Open Source Software Engineer at @Diagrid, contributing to and driving initiatives for the Dapr OSS project. I also serve as a Steering Committee member for the Knative Project, and I am Co-Leading the Knative Functions initiative. I’ve been writing on my blog, salaboy.com for over 15 years and I just published a book titled Platform Engineering on Kubernetes for Manning. I previously worked at VMware and Red Hat, building tools to help developers be more productive.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been working on Cloud Native and CNCF communities for over seven years now, and I’ve been constantly trying to give back and connect people who share the same interests around open source projects. Being an ambassador allows me to expand my network to keep connecting, mentoring, and guiding community members to grow.

Oleg is a passionate open source advocate and community builder. He works on user and developer communities around WireMock and WireMock Cloud. He is a core maintainer and board member in Jenkins, maintainer in Keptn and OpenFeature, and a TOC member in the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Oleg has a PhD degree in electronics design and volunteers in the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation. He helps to organize Jenkins, CDF and CNCF meetups in Switzerland.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: CNCF is a driver behind many open source initiatives and industry-wide projects in the areas of observability, software delivery and virtualization. For years I’ve been a user and contributor of many projects, and also advocated for CNCF projects and best practices in my talks. It is an honor to join the CNCF Ambassadors. There are many great folks there, and I am happy to join the team. Looking forward to participating more!

Sessionize profile: https://sessionize.com/onenashev/

I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Innablr, a top cloud engineering and platform consultancy in Melbourne. My role involves setting the technology direction for Innablr and guiding our clients through their transformation journey. I’ve been fortunate to work with some big companies in Melbourne, where I’ve helped them modernise their tech stacks with cloud native platforms that deliver applications quickly and securely. I started out as a developer and gradually transitioned to cloud engineering and DevOps. I’m really enthusiastic about the Kubernetes ecosystem and even co-organise the Melbourne Kubernetes User Group. We have recently started the Cloud Sustainability User Group Australia / New Zealand to build the comunity around the topic of sustainability.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled about becoming a CNCF Ambassador because it would serve as validation for the work I’ve done building the Melbourne Kubernetes community over the past few years. As an ambassador, I will have the opportunity to amplify my efforts and further expand the community.

I am an OSS addict, an active ArgoCD contributor and a speaker at CNCF events (GitOpsCon, ArgoCon, KubeDay Israel). I also actively encourage and inspire others to contribute to CNCF projects and to speak at conferences. I lead a Cloud Platform Team, and I live in Israel. On 08.10.2023, I was supposed to start a new role – Dev Advocate focused on OSS. On 07.10.2023, my country suffered a deadly terrorist attack and was forced into a war against terror, so all hands on deck. I’m still leading the Platform Team and will re-focus on advocating for OSS when we defeat terrorism. #StandWithIsrael

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love being part of and collaborating with the cloud-native OSS community. In addition to the great benefit of using OSS, I strongly believe that adopting the methodology used to write, maintain and release OSS widely benefits any organization. CNCF makes cloud-native OSS accessible to everyone, and I am excited to take part in fostering the CNCF ecosystem and increasing the OSS adoption.

I am a self-proclaimed “cloud automator”, and works primarily with Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Platform Engineering, DevOps and Cloud Native technology. I am a Microsoft MVP for my work with Azure, and an HashiCorp Ambassador primarily for my work with Terraform. Furthermore, I am active in the CNCF, OpenSSF and several open source communities and projects. I initiated Cloud Native Norway, a non-profit that works to build up and enable Cloud Native adoption and development in Norway. I also co-founded the Azure Cloud Native User Group, and founded the Norwegian PowerShell User Group. In the CNCF, I have been active for years in TAG App Delivery, and currently serves as a maintainer on the OpenGitOps project, and as co-chair of the Platforms Working Group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: For many years, the CNCF has continued to impress me. The way that the foundation has supported the community and the projects is truly admirable. Even though I have other honorary titles, the CNCF Ambassador title is one that I value very much. While I don’t do community work for the titles, I am happy for the recognition. I have big plans for my work in the CNCF, and I look forward to seeing how the ambassador program will help me achieve more for the community.

Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/roberth-strand

Saiyam is working as Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo with a focus on defining the Civo cloud platform for simplifying Kubernetes and making it accessible for developers. Previously at Walmart Labs, Oracle, and HP, Saiyam has worked on many facets of k8s including machine learning platform, scaling, multi-cloud, managed k8s services, and k8s documentation. He’s worked on implementing Kubernetes solutions in different organizations. When not coding, Saiyam works on contributing to the community by writing blogs and organizing local meetups for Kubernetes and CNCF. He is also a CNCF ambassador, runs a YouTube channel and Kubesimplify community that aims to simplify cloud native and can be reached on Twitter @saiyampathak

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Simplifying cloud native for everyone

Savitha Raghunathan is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, currently focusing on Application Modernization and Cloud Native adoption. Her role as a maintainer for the CNCF Sandbox project Konveyor has provided her with valuable insights into the growing demand for modernizing critical applications to align with cloud-native technologies, thereby deepening her understanding of the application lifecycle. In her previous position, Savitha worked as a platform engineer, where she dedicated herself to building internal developer platforms using Kubernetes and other cloud native projects.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Contributing to CNCF projects has been incredibly fulfilling, and the support and positivity I’ve experienced from the community during difficult periods, including the pandemic, have deepened my bond with this community. This role as a CNCF Ambassador has given me a chance to reciprocate that support, share my valuable experiences, and facilitate the onboarding of new contributors and adopters into the CNCF ecosystem.

I’ve been involved and passionated by the CNCF community for many years ! I’m co-organizing the Canadian CNCF & Kubernetes meetups for Canada (virtual) and Quebec City / Montreal meetups in person with other wonderful Organizers and Ambassadors ! I’m also a speaker in other meetups, at 2022 KubeCon US and at KubeCon’s Rejeks 2023. I love sharing my experience and documenting. I try to blog my projects and experiences. Check at https://medium.com/@prune998 I’m invested in some CNCF or OSS projects linked to K8s and I’m maintaining an official fork of KubeColor that was unmaintained for years: https://github.com/kubecolor/kubecolor I’ve been patching a lot of projects, OSS or CNCF, like ArgoCD, Cilium, Kafka tools…

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: My goal as an ambassador is to promote Kubernetes and the wonderful ecosystem under the CNCF banner. Being involved in the Ambassador community will help me grow my skills at communicating and hopefully inspire others to join the movement.

For many years now, I have been a strong advocate for the development and promotion of free and open-source software. My passion for this cause has led me to actively participate in various initiatives, such as organizing the Cloud Native Luxembourg meetups and being part of the French localization team of CNCF Glossary. I’m dedicated to promoting the benefits of open-source software, believing it to be more secure, reliable, and conducive to innovation. Additionally, I leverage my expertise to help teams harness cloud-native technologies, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Drawing from my passion for open-source, I will strive to promote the ethos of collaboration, emphasizing the merits of open-source projects within the CNCF landscape and encouraging more entities to contribute and participate. I am committed to guiding the next generation of cloud native enthusiasts. Through mentorship programs and hands-on training sessions, I aim to reduce the learning curve for newcomers and ensure they have the necessary tools and knowledge to thrive within the ecosystem. In essence, as a CNCF Ambassador, my overarching goal is to be a catalyst for growth, learning, and innovation within the Cloud Native community, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of technological progress while upholding the values of collaboration, inclusivity, and open-source spirit.

KCD France Organizer & Director of Technical Product Management at Kasten by Veeam, I specialize in all things Cloud Native, obviously Kubernetes, but also Storage, Network, Compute, Observability, Security, Infrastructure, etc. From datacenters to applications, from business to operations, I enjoy talking about every aspect of our connected world.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to represent the CNCF as an Ambassador to help others find their path through Cloud Native technologies and get started in the space. There is a technology for everyone, and there is a space for everyone, no matter to skill level, no matter you interest. If you don’t know where to start, come talk to me, I’ll be happy to get you oriented!

Thomas is a Cloud Native Engineer, Advocate and Educator enthusiastic about making cloud-native more comfortable. As a CNCF/CDF Ambassador and Open Source Maintainer (Keptn and K8sGPT), he is always eager to find ways to deliver software and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am very passionate about cloud-native technologies and working with them is cool. In the last few years, I got more and more involved in the cloud-native community and learned that it’s not only about technical things, it’s also about the people and the community. I am excited to be an ambassador because I like to bring people into the cloud-native world but also educate and teach them how to use products and technologies.