Meet your Cloud Native Ambassadors (CNAs)!
Ambassadors are an extension of CNCF, furthering the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous” through community leadership and mentorship.
Get the latest news on the program by following CNCF Ambassadors on Twitter!
Recent Ambassador News
My KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA Chicago 2023 Experience
November 28, 2023Recapping KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023
November 22, 2023Using GitHub apps with ArgoCD
October 27, 2023CNCF Ambassadors
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Showing 12 of 208 Ambassadors
(He/Him)
Anurag Kumar
(He/Him)
- Location: Kolkata, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Carvel, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, Emissary-ingress, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, ko, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Kubewarden, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus, Telepresence, zot
I’m contributor and maintainer of KubeArmor (A CNCF runtime security project). I’m interested in Kubernetes Security. You can read my blogs here https://kranurag.dev
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador because I’ll try to bring and educate more people towards CNCF ecosystem. CNCF is one of the most welcoming community. I also want to share my knowledge when it comes to Kubernetes and other CNCF projects to new peoples who’re getting started. Finally, I would love to meet and connect with fellow CNCF ambassadors.
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Aryat Khayretdinov
(He/Him)
- Location: Montreal, Canada
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, containerd, CoreDNS, Crossplane, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Lima, Linkerd, NATS, Notary, OpenCost, OpenEBS, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Thanos, The Update Framework (TUF), Vitess, WasmEdge Runtime
Ayrat (Archy) is a CNCF Ambassador, Cloud Native Tech Professor at Mcgill University and Cloud Native Architect at Google Cloud. As a CNCF Ambassador he has an opportunity to educate people and share knowledge about benefits of Cloud Native ecosystem via CNCF and Kubernetes Meetups, workshops or by helping customers to build modern cloud native applications that can run seamlessly on-prem or any cloud provider. Archy is passionate about community, he is a Founder and lead organizer of Canadian CNCF Meetups (Virtual, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Waterloo, Halifax) and frequent speaker GDG, CNCF Meetups and CNCF related conferences. He is an organizer of Canadian Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs), Cloud Native Days Canada 2019 and GDG Cloud & AI DevFest 2019.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: To be part of amazing team of Ambassadors provides you opportunity to learn from other experts and meet new friends across the world who is passionate about same technology. Being Ambassador also gives you a life time opportunity to meet and learn with Cloud Native Community at Kubecons. Give back to community by organizing K8s Meetups, KCDs and sharing the knowledge with wider community.
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Trendyol
Batuhan Apaydın
(He/Him)
Trendyol
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Buildpacks, cert-manager, containerd, Dex, Falco, Flux, Harbor, Helm, in-toto, ko, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Lima, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS, SPIFFE, SPIRE, zot
Batuhan Apaydın a.k.a. developer-guy has been very active in the Software Supply Chain Security space. He is eager to learn more about it in all aspects because he knows this topic will become one of the utmost critical topics that everybody has to be concerned about. Towards that direction, he won the “Best Sigstore Evangelist” award and wrote a blog post about it to encourage to the next one and took an active role in the first-ever SigstoreCon by being one of the Program Committee members of the event and created a Twitter Community about Software Supply Chain Security and that community is now about 500+ people joined. He is also selected as Docker Captain Program 2023. In addition to that he is also a CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Ambassador 2023. He also tries to be active in Turkey by organizing in-person, and virtual meetups, and workshops. He is the organizer of two important organizations in Turkey named DevOpsTr, CNCF Istanbul Chapter, and Cloud Native Turkiye. He is also one of the organizers of the KCD Turkey. He is also an active contributor to several CNCF projects including Ko, Flux, and Kyverno. He also enjoys writing technical blog posts and wrote 10+ blog posts and all of which are published on important official websites including Kyverno, CD Foundation, Flux, Sigstore, etc. • https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/10/18/tekton-chains/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/10/prove-the-authenticity-of-oci-artifacts/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/08/manage-kyverno-policies-as-ocirepositories/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/11/verify-the-integrity-of-the-helm-charts-stored-as-oci-artifacts-before-reconciling-them-with-flux/ • https://kubesimplify.com/the-secret-gems-behind-building-container-images-enter-buildkit-and-docker-buildx • https://blog.kubesimplify.com/getting-started-with-ko-a-fast-container-image-builder-for-your-go-applications • https://nirmata.com/securing_base_images/ • https://blog.sigstore.dev/how-to-verify-container-images-with-kyverno-using-kms-cosign-and-workload-identity-1e07d2b85061
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: First of all, I’m the first person from Turkey who has been selected as a CNCF Ambassador which is super great for me because I have the energy to spread all my knowledge with other people and I do really like to collaborate with people by organizing in-person, virtual meetups. I thought that I can waste my time and energy by becoming a CNCF Ambassador still continue organizing meetups and sharing knowledge because Turkiye has great potential of using CNCF projects to solve problems.
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Feynman Zhou
(He/Him)
- Location: Beijing, China
- Project Experience: Kubernetes, Notary, ORAS
Feynman is a product manager for Microsoft Azure. He is also a maintainer for CNCF ORAS and Notary Project. He is a big fan of open source and has been contributing to multiple CNCF projects over five years. He is a speaker of KubeCon and enjoy technology advocacy. He also hosted several events, such as Kubernetes Community Days China, CNCF Webinar, and cloud native meetups.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m super excited to be part of the Cloud Native Ambassadors family. I would like to work with other ambassador peers to learn and share cloud-native technologies.
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Aqua Security
Itay Shakury
(He/Him)
Aqua Security
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
- Languages: English, Hebrew
- Project Experience: Falco, Harbor, in-toto, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Policy Containers, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus
Itay Shakury is VP Open Source at Aqua Security, where he leads engineering and strategy of open source, cloud native, security solutions. Itay has some 20 years of professional experience in various software development, architecture and product management roles. Itay had initiated several local technical communities and events, including the successful CNCF Tel Aviv meetup group.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m honored to be recognized as a CNCF Ambassador, and join this amazing team of worldwide experts. To me, the CNCF is an intersection between two passions of mine – technology and community, which I have been pursuing since early in my career. I’m excited to continue to collaborate with the various technical working groups, events, projects and initiatives that the CNCF ecosystem continuously generates.
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Peak Scale
Johann Gyger
(He/Him)
Peak Scale
- Location: Bern, Switzerland
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Cilium, Flux, Helm, in-toto, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Prometheus, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Strimzi
Johann is a passionate software engineer living in Switzerland. He has over 20 years of industry experience working as a developer, architect, trainer, and consultant in various domains and for different customers. Johann is enthusiastic about the cloud-native movement and organizes the Swiss Cloud Native day (https://cloudnativeday.ch) and the Cloud Native Bern Meetup (http://www.cloudnativebern.ch).
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Bringing engineers together at meetups and conferences is a fulfilling and inspirational task. I love to connect with this thriving community on a local and international level. And I would like to raise awareness of environmental sustainability.
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Josh Gavant
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- Location: Chicago, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, Carvel, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, Dapr, Devfile, Dex, Distribution, Envoy, etcd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Konveyor, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, KubeVirt, KUDO, Kyverno, Open Cluster Management, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, ORAS, Porter, Prometheus, Rook, sealer, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Strimzi, Thanos, zot
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!
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Humanitec
Mathieu Benoit
(He/Him)
Humanitec
- Location: Québec, Canada
- Project Experience: gRPC, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS
I’m passionate about Cloud Native Computing technologies driven by Cloud, Security, Kubernetes and Platform Engineering. I’m one of the co-organizers of the CNCF&K8s Meetup in Quebec city (Canada). You will find some of my learnings in my personal blog: https://mathieu-benoit.github.io/ and in my Medium space: https://medium.com/@mabenoit.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a Cloud Native Ambassador will allow me to be closer to the CNCF community, and be connected to more mentors to grow my knowledge and as an individual too. It will also allow me to find more tips to promote content related to CNCF projects, and hopefully I will be able to help and inspire others to be more involved in this community.
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Olivier Vernin
(He/Him)
- Location: Belgium
- Project Experience: Artifact Hub, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Helm, Kubernetes, Kubewarden, OpenGitOps, ORAS, zot
Engineering Manager at SUSE, working on Kubernetes’s related projects such as Kubewarden, Epinio, Rancher Fleet. Builder of Updatecli, and Former Infrastructure officer of the Jenkins project. Olivier has some experience in building OSS tooling around infrastructure, automation, and growing communities.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: OSS projects have been a game changer in today’s IT world. Not only, it allow us to read and understand today’s application source code but ultimately it allows us to learn and share knowledge across our industry. The CNCF had a tremendous impact on breaking boundaries and fostering communities to work together and I am super excited to bring my little contribution to this movement.
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AWS
Phil Estes
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AWS
- Location: Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
- Project Experience: Buildpacks, Confidential Containers, containerd, CRI-O, Distribution, gRPC, Istio, k3s, Keylime, ko, Kubernetes, Lima, Notary, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, The Update Framework (TUF), Virtual Kubelet, zot
Phil is a Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on core container technologies that power AWS container compute offerings. Phil is currently an active contributor and maintainer for containerd, a graduated CNCF project, and participates in the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the member of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Phil enjoys helping others understand and implement container and cloud native concepts and speaks worldwide at industry conferences and meetups on behalf of AWS and his open source roles.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador for the express purpose of helping others understand the world of containers and, specifically, the core container runtime technology and standards that enable and power that world. Having been involved in the CNCF since nearly its beginning, I know that it can be an overwhelming place for newcomers at it has grown, and as an ambassador, I’m happy to play a part in helping people understand and navigate the projects and work of the CNCF.
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sevensphere
Rachid Zarouali
(He/Him)
sevensphere
- Location: Lyon, France
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, ContainerSSH, CoreDNS, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, Curiefense, DevSpace, etcd, external-secrets, Falco, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Kured, Kyverno, metal3-io, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Parsec, Pixie, Prometheus, Telepresence, Thanos, zot
Freelance cloud architect, OSS addict, huge fan of k8s, cilium, argocd and friends. I speak regularly about cloud tech, security and OSS projects I use or implement for my clients. I run several meetups in my city Docker, CNCF Lyon, DevSecCon France, co-organize conferences (KCDFRANCE) and involved regularly as conference MC and member of CFP committee , more importantly I’m a happy husband and dad
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m freaking excited to join the ambassador community.To meet new friends, help growing communities, sharing the skills I’ve learned and give back to the CNCF community. Being an ambassador will allow me to what i love the most, mentoring, i can’t wait to jump in !
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Microsoft
Xander Grzywinski
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Microsoft
- Location: Seattle, United States
- Project Experience: Helm, Kubernetes, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS, Prometheus
Xander is an open source product manager at Microsoft. He is also a member of the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee, and was release lead for Kubernetes 1.27. When not in front of a computer screen, you’d likely find him at a pottery wheel.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I’m excited to help continue to make the cloud native community as kind and inclusive as it can be. I’ve always felt very welcome in this community, and I hope to be able to extend that same feeling to others.