Ambassadors

Community leader and CNCF ambassador, Alessandro has spent the last few years building cloud native infrastructures for Microsoft customers, animating the Dutch community, and training others to pass the CKx exams. He has passion for all things cloud native, he’s been around open source for 25 years and recently moved to a new Developer Relations role. Twitter handle: @bongo

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Because I was before and it was awesome!

I am an engineering director for Kubernetes at Canonical. I participate in opensource as a Governing board member for Keptn and a founder of the Open Feature project. When I fancy taking to the camera I also run a youtube channel for advocating learning for senior engineers https://www.youtube.com/c/CloudNativeSkunkworks/featured

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I believe the ambassador programme is perfectly timed to come out of hibernation as people yearn for more day-to-day information on the CNCF and where to get started. I’ve been here a while now and I am happy to help be that guide on their cloud-native journey.

Tech and Community lover with more than 10 years of experience playing with software professionally. Engaged in cloud native since 2017 when he began learning about Kubernetes, it served as his gateway to the world of tech meetups. Since then, he has actively participated in and collaborated with multiple tech communities in Guatemala and across Latin America Actively collaborating with: Cloud Native Latam – CNCF Group Kubernetes Guatemala – CNCF Group Cloud Native Guatemala – CNCF Group Kong Meetup Guatemala TensorFlow User Group Guatemala.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Since I first started learning about tech, the community has played a significant role, and being part of a Cloud Native meetup I’ve been able to see how it creates great opportunities to meet people, learn from their experiences, get inspired and inspire others! I strongly believe that the community movement can make a difference specially on my region, helping us not just to improve our technical skills but also in how we interact, create and learn together.

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.

Ananda Dwi Rahmawati is a Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, specializing in system integration between cloud infrastructure, CI/CD workflows, and application modernization. She is a regular technical speaker who delivers presentations using real-world case studies at several local community meetups and conferences, such as Kubernetes and OpenInfra Days Indonesia, GNOME Asia Summit, LibreOffice Conference, and many more.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming an ambassador is such a huge dream. I love to open-source and cloud-native projects, willing do more contributions and spread the spirit of open-source enthusiasts to others.

I am a freelance cloud-native engineer and trainer based in Amsterdam. When I am not coding, I enjoy helping the community by organizing meetups, Kubernetes community days, and workshops on cloud technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Ambassadors are a point of reference in the cloud native community and help many initiatives come to life. I want to empower talented individuals to realize their ambitions and help the CNCF to reach a wider community through events, meetups, and mentoring. I want to make a difference by empowering others.

Been working in software since 1998 and from the early days was drawn to performance engineering, observability and more recently on DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering. I am an active contributor to the CNCF project Keptn, I am a podcaster, I create YouTube tutorials and occasionally blog as well! Besides IT I am passionate about salsa dancing 🙂

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The success of any community depends on the people that actively drive community activities (bringing people together, educating, making them feel comfortable ..) and the members of the community that then want to join, grow and eventually contribute back to that community. I am excited to get the chance to help grow the community with my goal to inspire many others to do the same

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.

I work as a Software Engineer, focusing on cloud-native development. My interest lies in discussing and writing about open-source software, cloud security, and the Linux kernel. Furthermore, I am a contributor and maintainer to the KubeArmor project, and have also served as a mentor in various outreach programs.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a CNCF ambassador provides the opportunity to connect with inspiring individuals and learn from their diverse experiences. I firmly believe in the strength of open source, and this role offers the opportunity to continue giving back to the community. I look forward to expanding my impact within the community, collaborating with fellow ambassadors, and enjoying the journey of contributing to a thriving ecosystem.

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.

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.

Aurélie is a DevRel at OVHcloud. She is a GDE (Google Developer Expert) for Cloud technologies, Docker Captain, CNCF Ambassador & GitPod Hero. Conferences and meetups organizer since 2016. She is a technical writer, a book author & reviewer. She is also a sketchnoter and a speaker at international conferences. She created a new visual way for people to learn and understand Cloud technologies: “Understanding Kubernetes/Istio/Docker in a visual way” in sketchnotes, videos and visual technical books. Blog: https://dev.to/aurelievache/ Conferences: https://noti.st/aurelievache YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AurelieVache Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Aur%C3%A9lie-Vache/author/B09WHB5YR6 Website: http://scraly.com/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been a passionate and advocate of Cloud Native, especially CNCF technologies, for many years and I am very happy to be its ambassador. It’s an opportunity for me to share and spread knowledge, contribute to native cloud technologies and meet the community.

Brad is originally from New Zealand now working in Australia as the Head of Platform Engineering, he has been involved in the DevOps space for a long time now and serves as a board member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Brad is a maintainer of the Keptn project and works on the Kubernetes Release team. And is involved in mentoring in GSoC projects. His favorite projects to work on from the CNCF are GitOps, Security and Observability projects. He is helping to organize the KCD Australia and also runs a meetup in Australia.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador to further help and mentor other folks coming into the cloud native space and guide them in the right direction. I’m also excited because I can continue working on the outreach of the CNCF and show organizations how they can contribute and help grow the projects and unlock innovation.

Cailyn is a Senior Infrastructure Security Engineer, with a passion for Kubernetes and the open source world. She is an active contributor to Kubernetes SIG-Security, SIG-CLI and a 2022 Kubernetes Contributor Award recipient. Her current focus is on network, and Kubernetes multi-tenancy security and she gets to spend her working hours contributing up stream. It brings her great joy to spend time with the CNCF community and empower folks to become involved. Outside of work Cailyn can be found running, playing squash, walking her dogs or working in the garden.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am *so* excited to be a CNCF ambassador because this community has been incredibly impactful to my growth in the industry and I want to give back. I cannot wait to help share all the wonderful things happening at CNCF and organize events for members new and old. One of my favourite parts of my job is mentoring, and I look forward to being able to do this in the Cloud Native community! I want to ensure that each new member has the same welcoming and positive experience that I did!

.

Carlos Santana is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS leading Container solutions in the Worldwide Application Modernization GTM team. He is experienced in distributed application architecture, emerging technologies, open source, serverless, gitops, devops. He is a contributor to CNCF projects such as Kubernetes and Knative. Find him on Twitter @csantanapr or his Kubernetes Bookclub https://santana.dev

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to work with the CNCF, and be able to help the CNCF to improve on how it works and get perceive by the community of contributors and consumer of cloud native tech. I’m excited to meet new folks and be able to collaborate on projects on enablement of projects such as Kubernetes.

Chad is a DevSecOps Engineer for Raft (goraft.tech), and author of the book “Acing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam”. Chad has been an instructor for over five years on platforms such as A Cloud Guru and INE. Through KubeSkills, he helps people find fun and interactive ways to learn Kubernetes.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I really enjoy helping people get involved in open source software. I have realized the power of community, in lifting others up and succeeding together, and I love to share it with others. I believe it is my duty in life to share what I’ve learned in order to make intellectual progress as a human race.

Chamod Shehanka Perera serves as a Software Engineer and is a passionate advocate for open source and cloud-native technologies. He has a keen interest in delivering tech talks on subjects like open source and cloud technologies. Notably, he has taken on leadership roles for KCD Sri Lanka 2022 and KCD Sri Lanka 2023, alongside his dedicated team. Presently, he leads various communities, including Kubernetes Sri Lanka, GDG Sri Lanka, and GitHub Community Sri Lanka, while he’s also fully experienced on building cloud native CI/CD platform when worked at WSO2. He shares his insights and experiences related to software development on his blog, accessible at https://chamodshehanka.medium.com. Furthermore, he has successfully implemented a solution for Database Scaling on Kubernetes as part of his undergraduate research, which has been published as a paper (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9671185). In his leisure time, Chamod Shehanka Perera is an avid practitioner of karate, holding a 2nd-degree black belt, and enjoys spending time at the gym and surfing on weekends.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador because it allows me to continue what I’m doing, giving back to the community and contributing to CNCF projects. Additionally, the role offers the opportunity to network with new people, fostering connections with like-minded individuals. As an ambassador, I look forward to sharing knowledge and ideas, enabling us all to stay updated on the latest developments in this rapidly-evolving field.

Daniel Oh is Java Champion and Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat. He works to evangelize building cloud-native microservices and serverless functions with cloud-native runtimes to developers. He also continues to contribute to various open-source cloud projects and ecosystems as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ambassador for accelerating DevOps adoption in enterprises. Daniel also speaks at technical seminars, workshops, and meetups to elaborate on new emerging technologies for enterprise developers, SREs, platform engineers, and DevOps teams.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It will give me more opportunities to meet more technical folks who want to adopt/learn new cloud-native technologies and tools. Also, the ambassador makes me a more proactive person to evangelize non-tech people in terms of how/why they move forward to the cloud.

Horovits lives at the intersection of technology, product and innovation. With over 20 years in the hi-tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud native, DevOps practices, open source and more.

Horovits is a public speaker and thought leader in the fields of DevOps, open source and specifically observability, appearing on stage at KubeCon, Open Source Summit, FOSDEM and more. He also runs the popular OpenObservability Talks podcast, and you can also follow his blog and articles.

Horovits is a leader in the Israeli community, an organizer of the CNCF chapter in Tel Aviv, and an organizer of the Israeli editions of Kubernetes Community Days (KCD), KubeDay and DevOpsDays.

Currently working as the Principal Developer Advocate at Logz.io, Horovits evangelizes on Observability in IT systems using popular open source projects such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenSearch.

• Podcast: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/openobservability
• Blog: medium.com/@horovits
• YouTube: youtube.com/@horovits
• Sessionize: sessionize.com/horovits

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been advocating for open source and for the CNCF and its projects for years, online, on stage and with local communities, and I’m looking forward to expanding this activity as a formal CNCF Ambassador.

I am a passionate technologist with a focus on cloud-native technologies, particularly Kubernetes. As a co-organizer of Cloud Native Lithuania Meetup, I have helped to build a strong community of like-minded professionals where everyone is sharing their own experience. In addition to my meetup involvement, I am a speaker at technology conferences and currently work as an SRE at Vinted, where I bring my expertise in Kubernetes to help ensure the reliability and scalability of our systems.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because it enables me to connect with like-minded other ambassadors, share our knowledges and expertise and will help to educate and promote cloud-native technologies to a wider audience. The role also provides access to exclusive events and resources, as well as opportunities for professional growth and career development. Overall, being a Cloud Native Foundation Ambassador is a great way to give back to the community!

Edidiong Asikpo is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is passionate about sharing her knowledge of DevOps through technical articles, videos, and social media. Edidiong has given over 100+ talks at tech events worldwide and continues to play a significant role in building developer communities in Africa. She is a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer and Open Source contributor. When she’s not doing anything tech-related, she travels across the world, takes beautiful pictures, and analyzes movies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: July is going to make it 2 years since I transitioned to the cloud native ecosystem. The thing with moving to a new field is that you’d often times struggle with imposter syndrome or ask yourself if you made the right decision to switch when things become overwhelming. Nevertheless, I woke up every day trying to do better and put my best foot forward. Less than two years down the line and I’ve been selected as a CNCF Ambassador. What? That’s so exciting for me and it makes me super proud of myself for not being scared to take a chance on myself and learn in public. Now, I can create and share cloud native learning resources, guides, and how-tos with the community on a global scale.

Emin is working as a Solutions Architect and has undertaken tasks such as producing solutions related to Kubernetes, Cloud technologies and Cloud Native Transformation in general, and transferring best practices about these areas. He is part of the AWS Community Builder Program within the Containers category and he is part of the HashiCorp Ambassador Program within the Open Source community. He is part of the organiser team of the official CNCF Istanbul Community Chapter (https://community.cncf.io/istanbul/). He publishes blog posts from his personal Medium page (https://medium.com/@eminalemdar) and also participates in Open Source and Cloud Native related conferences and delivers talks about these technologies. He is in the organiser team of Kubernetes Community Days Turkiye conference.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Community activities have always been my biggest motivation throughout my career. Helping people and learning from the people by participating in community activities is extremely important for me. Cloud Native Community is really one of a kind and being part of this community is really like a dream coming true for me.

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.

Fog Dong, a maintainer of KubeVela, and a senior engineer at Alibaba Cloud. She has been actively involved in the open source community, particularly in the cloud native DevOps field. Fog is now responsible for building large scale application workflow for Serverless Application Engine Product in Alibaba, while she’s also fully experienced on building cloud native CI/CD platform when worked at Bytedance.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an Ambassador of CNCF, I am excited to have the opportunity to promote and educate people about cloud-native technologies, which are shaping the future of computing. CNCF has a vibrant community of developers and tech enthusiasts who are passionate about advancing these technologies, and I am thrilled to be a part of this community. Additionally, as an ambassador, I will have the chance to connect with other like-minded individuals and share knowledge and ideas, which will help us all stay up-to-date with the latest developments in this rapidly-evolving field. Overall, I am honored to represent CNCF and am looking forward to contributing to the growth and success of this innovative organization.

Frederico started working with GNU and Linux in the mid-90s out of sheer curiosity, a decision that strongly influenced his life. Actively involved in the free software and open source community from early on, he made a path from programming and system administration towards data science, cloud computing and enterprise architecture. In recent years he has been actively involved in projects touching such diverse areas as Quantum computing, IoT, and analytics, and actively participating in the Kubernetes project as part of the Release Team, SIG Contribex, and others. He currently leads the Cloud and Architecture domain at SAS, for the South West & East Europe region. He holds a BA in Archaeology from the University of Lisbon, where he is an MA student and where he also took Physics.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I see being a CNCF Ambassador as a great opportunity to engage with others both in the technical aspects of cloud-native computing and in the many ways that those interested can become active members of the community. Cloud-native technology has largely been developed through open collaboration, and being an Ambassador is taking a step towards more visible participation in building the community – and learning from it.

Guy was fortunate enough to experience hands-on the entire evolution of cloud-native computing, from bare-metal servers to VMs and ultimately to Kubernetes. He is passionate about sharing his vast knowledge by writing blogs, speaking at global events, creating video content, and contributing to open-source projects by the CNCF. Guy has been dubbed “The Good Guy” by his peers and members of the community for his persistent desire to help others. It’s no wonder then that his day job at Komodor revolves around helping organizations to adopt K8s and solve the challenges that come with it, while his free time is dedicated to building a local community for Solution Architects and maintaining his educational Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@the_good_guy

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because it allows me to further my mission of sharing knowledge and driving the adoption of cloud-native technologies. As an ambassador, I will have the opportunity to create more resources, collaboration opportunities, and initiatives with the community & end-users to promote adoption and innovation.

I started my career in a data center in Istanbul, Turkey. I have been interested in the CNCF world since 2018. Although my main areas are generally technical aspects, there were companies where I took part in community and product management. I am currently in the role of Co-Founder at Kubezy. Apart from the commercial side, we have been organizing events as Organizers at CNCG Istanbul since last year, together with my friends in Turkey. I am also a member of the KCD Türkiye team. I have a community role as Technology Evangelist at KubeSphere and KubeSphere Products.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am in love with community and all things community. I have met so many people since I first joined the CNCF community. It is a great pleasure to contribute to this community with people from all over the world who believe in the same goal. One goal and hundreds of people contributing to this goal. I think my biggest excitement in being an ambassador is making new friends and representing my community in the best way possible. Also, ambassador swags are great 🙂

Harry is a DevOps Evangelist and CTO @ Melio AI. He specialises in helping organisations navigate the cloud native landscape and adopt cloud native technologies. Harry runs the Cloud Native Computing Johannesburg Meetup which is part of the CNCF community groups in South Africa. https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-computing-johannesburg/ https://community.cncf.io/johannesburg/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Harry is excited to be an ambassador as he is able to bring local cloud native enthusiasts together. This creates a platform where everyone can share their experiences embarking on their cloud native journeys. Through frequent knowledge sharing, this advances the entire cloud native community as a whole.

Harshita Sao is an engineering student and contributor to several areas of the upstream Kubernetes project through SIGs, including Release, Contribex, etc. She has been a member of the Release Team since Kubernetes v1.25 and has been Comms Lead for the v1.27 release cycle.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to be an ambassador, as I’m learning about the CNCF ecosystem, contributing to its different projects, and sharing my knowledge and experience with others so that they, too, can begin their journey in this incredible ecosystem. Being an ambassador allows me to learn more about the ecosystem, work and network with amazing people, and find new ways and opportunities to share knowledge with others and help grow this wonderful community.

Huan has more than 15 years of work experience, and his current focus is cloud-native edge computing, distributed cloud, and high-performance computing. He is currently working as a Senior Technical Director at HarmonyCloud, a company located in Hangzhou, China, providing leading cloud-native products and solutions for hundreds of enterprise customers, including Kubernetes, PaaS, edge computing, micro service visibility, DevOps, etc. In addition, Huan serves as a Technical Steering Committe member of the CNCF edge computing project KubeEdge. Huan is an open source technology enthusiast and is currently committed to building an open source technology ecosystem in China.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The company I work for, HarmonyCloud, is an influential cloud native tehnology supplier in China and a long-term partner of CNCF. HarmonyCloud has helped many customers around the world complete the transformation of cloud-native technology. At the same time, I am currently working as a TSC member in the CNCF Project KubeEdge community, responsible for leading several SIG teams and working with other TSC members towards the graduation of the KubeEdge project. Over the years, I have also given speeches at conferences organized by CNCF. Therefore, I am familiar with the operation process of CNCF projects and understand the job responsibilities of CNCF ambassadors. If I become an ambassador, I will promote the maturity and promotion of Kubernetes, KubeEdge and more open source projects, and help users around the world to apply these advanced and open source cloud-native tenologies.

Humble, a Staff Engineer/Tech Lead at VMware and a dedicated open source advocate for over 17 years, also serves as a Ceph Ambassador. Since 2016, his pivotal role as a core contributor/maintainer to Kubernetes has been instrumental in its ongoing maintenance and evolution. Notably, he initiated the Kubernetes Bangalore meetup, uniting over 8k+ enthusiasts, and assumed an organizational role in the Cloud Native Bangalore chapter. Expanding his influence, in 2019, Humble spearheaded the creation and management of the Kubernetes Kerala Meetup, actively nurturing the Cloud Native community in the region while leading KCD Kerala 2024. His fervor for mentoring and empowering individuals drives his ongoing commitment. Alongside speaking engagements at various conferences, his impactful blogs on Cloud Native technologies underline his expertise. Furthermore, his authorship of “Mastering KVM Virtualization” solidifies his authoritative stance in the field. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/graphs/contributors https://kcdkerala.in https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-bangalore/ https://bit.ly/k8sKerala https://bit.ly/k8sBLR https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/container-native-storage-39-enhanced-day-2-management-and-unified-installation-within-openshift-container-platform https://kubernetes.io/blog/2022/09/21/kubernetes-1-25-use-secrets-while-expanding-csi-volumes-on-node-alpha/ https://www.humblec.com/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador because it offers a unique opportunity to actively contribute to the world of cloud-native technologies, which is a dynamic and rapidly evolving field. As an ambassador, I can foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among a diverse group of professionals, ultimately advancing the adoption and understanding of cloud-native practices. It’s an inspiring role that allows me to be at the forefront of innovation and connect with experts and enthusiasts in the CNCF ecosystem, all while promoting the growth of these transformative technologies.

Interested in open source, machine learning, compiler, and natural language processing. Exploring language parsing with Rust and R. Part of Shadow of Kubernetes Release Team 1.17 and 1.18. Shadow Chairs of Kubernetes SIGs Docs. Emeritus-Co-Chairs of Kubernetes SIGs Docs. Contributing in Kubernetes, Planout and Ax (Facebook), Google Cloud Platform and Google API (Google), Keras. Programme Committee at Helm Summit 2019. Programme Committee at Grace Hopper 2020. Programme Committee at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon APAC 2020. Programme Committee at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2020. KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Track Chair for ML & Data EU 2021 NA 2022. Track Host for CPPCon 2022. Mentor At Grace Hopper OSD 2022.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to be a Cloud Native Foundation ambassador because it offers an incredible platform to advocate for state-of-the-art cloud technologies and best practices. Being part of this community allows me to engage with thought leaders, share knowledge, and contribute to shaping the future of cloud computing. Moreover, this role empowers me to bridge the gap between developers, businesses, and the broader public, fostering innovation and growth in the ecosystem.

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.

Founder at SIGHUP, I have been involved with Kubernetes and the CNCF since its inception in 2015. I am passionate about Kubernetes and full lifecycle management of production-grade infrastructures, open standards and currently serving in the advisory board of Linux Foundation Europe.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to continue supporting the CNCF, both as a community of like-minded individuals and as a technological ecosystem. My mission is to encourage organizations to adopt open source projects as a foundation for the evolution of their infrastructure and governance, promoting the use of OSS and Open Standards.

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.

Jessica is Product Area Lead for Engineering Enablement at Kognic, providing products and services for internal development teams. She runs the Gothenburg chapter for CNCF communities and is an active part in Cloud Native Nordics.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to continue creating an open community for sharing and learning around cloud native technologies and to get a chance to meet other amazing people doing similar work all around the world.

I’m Jim Angel. I love solving problems and working with incredible people! I’m primarily involved with upstream Kubernetes (SIG-Release and SIG-Docs). Currently working on restarting our local Austin meetup and a Texas KCD. You can follow my latest projects at jimangel.io

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It’s awesome to get to know so many great people and work with leading technology that’s responsible for changing multiple industries. The community that keeps Kubernetes open and welcome is a special thing, and I hope to maintain such standards myself. I also enjoy helping connect the folks using open source tooling with the resources they need to be successful, and being an ambassador keeps me connected.

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.

I am the co-founder and CTO of Seiso, where we work with software companies to improve their security and compliance. I’ve been contributing to open source for the past decade; I’m a member of the CNCF Security TAG, run a meetup called Steel City InfoSec, the BSides Pittsburgh conference, and teach Cloud and DevOps Security classes.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m looking to help people adopt cloud native technology quickly and securely!

I have been working around software development for more than 6 years. Involving development, infrastructure architecture, monitoring, etc. Currently, I work as SRE at SCRM Lidl International Hub. Also, I have been awarded with Microsoft MVP for 4 years in a row and nowadays, I invest the majority of my free time contributing to KEDA. I’m proud about my puppies and my wife, and I use the rest of the time with them.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The program provides a platform for ambassadors to connect and collaborate with other cloud-native enthusiasts and promote the adoption of cloud-native practices. By becoming a CNCF ambassador, one can contribute to the open-source community and help shape the future of cloud-native computing.

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!

Julia Furst Morgado is a Global Technologist – Office of the CTO at Veeam Software. With over five years of experience in the industry, her focus is on simplifying Cloud Native technologies by sharing her expertise and experiences. She is also committed to empowering communities as the organizer of the NY Code & Coffee Meetup and KubeHuddle conference, and by being an AWS Community Builder, a Women Techmakers Ambassador and a Girl Code Ambassador.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I strongly believe in raising awareness about how people can help the CNCF community beyond just coding, and encourage more individuals to get involved in whatever capacity they can. I am excited to produce content, promote cloud native technologies, participate in major events, and connect with global communities.

Julien Pivotto is a prominent figure in the world of open-source monitoring and alerting. As a maintainer of Prometheus, he has made significant contributions to the development and advancement of this powerful tool. Additionally, he is the co-founder of O11y, a company that specializes in providing premium support for various open-source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a maintainer, I am truly enthusiastic about being a CNCF ambassador because the foundation contributes significantly to the success and growth of numerous open-source projects. By becoming an ambassador, I can give back to the community by promoting CNCF’s initiatives, spreading awareness about its contributions, and helping others discover the value of cloud native technologies.

I am a Computer Engineering student from India. I passionately advocate open source and tech. I am lead of cloud-native community group Nashik. I also run a blog site and youtube channel to educate people and students about CNCF tooling. http://community.cncf.io/nashik/ https://blogs.kaiwalyakoparkar.com/ https://youtube.com/@kaiwalya_koparkar

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador as it will help me reach out to more students and student communities and help them get their first steps into cloud-native. I believe students can bring much more value to the cloud native ecosystem and being a CNCF ambassador will enable me introduce more students to the ecosystem.

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.

An experienced DevOps Engineer with a solid background spanning over 5 years, specializing in CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) technologies. I’ve excelled in developing and implementing robust infrastructures for seamless application deployment, with a focus on optimizing availability through industry best practices. Additionally, actively contribute to the CNCF community by organizing significant events like KCD Sri Lanka 2022, KCD Sri Lanka 2023, and hosting monthly Kubernetes Sri Lanka live streams on YouTube, fostering knowledge sharing and keeping professionals updated with the latest advancements in cloud-native technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Each ambassador may have their unique reasons for their excitement, but the chance to influence, connect, contribute, and learn often serves as significant driving forces behind their enthusiasm for taking on this role.

Kohei Ota is a Senior Field Engineer at Apple. He is a CNCF Ambassador and contributes to Kubernetes SIG Docs as the Japanese localization owner in the CNCF communities. He also organizes Docker Meetup Tokyo and CloudNative Days Tokyo; some of the biggest “container/cloud native” communities and conferences in Japan.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been involved with local cloud native community based in Japan. Unfortunately not many folks from Japan have tightened relationship with international community. I’m excited to be part of organizers of both sides and would love to help local experts become part of the international community!

A techie from Norway who preaches about all things cloud native, Kubernetes, green tech and cats. I am working as a Principal Cloud Engineer, am a Microsoft Azure MVP and CNCF ambassador. Co-Host at Kubernetes Unpacked podcast, owner of kristhecodingunicorn.com tech blog, co-organizer and board member at NNUG Oslo, Cloud Native and Kubernetes Oslo, DEVREAL Oslo and Cloud Native Norway community groups. Community Advocate and Co-Organizer at StreamingClouds and Mentor at GirlCode and WomenTech Network.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love giving back to the tech community and I hope that my actions and contributions can inspire others to create software with sustainability, security and cloud native principles in mind. Another important goal for me is to contribute to even stronger diversity, equality and inclusion in the cloud native space by creating a non-judgemental, open, safe and welcoming space for everyone. By being an ambassador I can focus even more on doing just that! I’m also very excited to meet all the fantastic ambassadors and members of the cloud native community and collaborate on making a positive impact in the CNCF space together 🙂

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.

Working as the CTO of LAB3, one of the fastest growing Microsoft Partners in the Southern Hemisphere, with a focus on leveraging Cloud-Native solutions for enterprise and regulated clients. Large background in the use of IaC especially Terraform and ways of working in the ANZ region. Extremely fortunate to run both the Melbourne and Brisbane HashiCorp User Group (Meetup)

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I can’t wait to connect with some of the most active and intelligent ambassadors for the CNCF space and learn from them

Lee Calcote is the Founder of Layer5, where the community helps organizations harness and exploit the value of service meshes. Previously, Calcote stewarded technology strategy and innovation across SolarWinds. He led software-defined data center engineering at Seagate, delivering predictive analytics and modern systems management. Calcote held various leadership positions at Cisco, where he created Cisco’s cloud management platforms and pioneered new, automated, remote management services.

In addition to his role at Layer5, Calcote serves in various industry bodies, including as a SIG chair in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and formerly, participated in the delivery of Redfish 1.0 in the Distributed Management Task Foundation (DMTF), and Docker Benchmark 1.0 in Center for Internet Security (CIS). He is a startup advisor, Docker Captain, Cloud Native Ambassador, O’Reilly author, and speaker in the cloud native ecosystem.

Calcote is a maintainer of open source projects, including Meshery, Service Mesh Interface, and Service Mesh Performance. Calcote holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a master’s degree in Business Administration from California State University, Fresno and retains a list of industry certifications.

Meetup: Cloud Native Austin

Hey, my name is Leonard Pahlke, and I am a software engineer with a focus on cloud, open source and sustainability. I like to build systems that tend to get big and complex. I post regularly on the CNCF blog and my own website lvsp.io. I am a CNCF Ambassador, Chair for the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability, lead the Kubernetes release team for v1.26 and organize meetups in Hamburg.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love the cloud and the infinite variety and complexity of systems that can be built on it. The CNCF truly makes cloud-native applications accessible to anyone and any platform. The open source spirit fascinates and inspires me. Serving as a ambassador the community is a great honor.

Lin is the Director of Open Source at Solo.io. She has worked on Istio service mesh since the beginning of the project in 2017 and serves on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book “Istio Ambient Explained” and has more than 200 patents to her name.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am an open-source enthusiast and firm believer in CNCF as a vendor-neutral foundation for many of the fastest-growing cloud native projects ever since my very first KubeCon in Seattle in 2016. I appreciate much my first speaking opportunity at KubeCon 2017 in Berlin, which I think likely wouldn’t have happened if CNCF had not given adequate consideration to speaker diversity. I owe my career growth partially to KubeCon and open source projects such as Istio, for which I made over 8500 contributions over the past 6 years. By becoming a CNCF ambassador, I want to give back to the cloud native community by welcoming and including new members, and promoting and enhancing the CNCF brand and some of the CNCF projects that I have expertise in.

Lucas is an independent cloud native expert, former Kubernetes SIG co-lead, an avid KubeCon speaker, and one of the organizers of the CNCF meetups in Finland. Primary expertise include Kubernetes, GitOps and educating cloud native concepts.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve had the fortune to learn from world-class cloud native leaders, and I want to pay it forward by organizing, speaking at and participating in cloud native events. In addition, I’m excited to make the cloud native concepts more tangible through my research.

Marcus is a platform engineer and his main area of focus in recent years has been around CI/CD, Go, Kubernetes, containers and DevOps but originally started out as a web developer and JavaScript enthusiast. A self-described “tinkerer”, when not building Kubernetes solutions, Marcus likes to dabble with 3D printing and experimenting with smart home tech. He can be found blogging online at www.MarcusNoble.co.uk and giving talks at meetups & conferences.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to leverage the support of the CNCF to better help others within out community through shared knowledge and experience. I’m excited for the opportunity to meet more amazing people in the cloud native space and learn from their experiences and expertise.

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.

Marko is a Senior Software Engineer at Kubermatic working on development of open source platforms for managing Kubernetes clusters on scale. He’s a long time Kubernetes contributor, working on many different areas, notably Release and Infrastructure. He has been a Kubernetes Release Manager since 2020, responsible for shipping Kubernetes releases in a secure and reliable manner. Marko is also a Teaching Associate at School of Computing, University Union in Belgrade, Serbia, teaching Cloud Native Technologies to the final year students.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: First of all, I’m thrilled to work with and learn from our very experienced community members. I hope to use this opportunity to share my knowledge, as a long time Kubernetes contributor and Teaching Associate focused at Cloud Native Technologies, with the broader community and make contributing to the Cloud Native ecosystem easier and more appealing. I also hope to provide support to the CNCF projects to attract and retain contributors via different initiatives and mechanisms.

Mars is a telecom engineer with ~20 years of experience. He’s a co-organizer of Dallas Kubernetes meetup group and is active at #sig-contribex, helping with Kubernetes Contributor Summits. In the past he’s also been part of KubeCon Program Committee and helped develop some of CNCF exams (KCNA, CKAD, PCA etc).

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: There’s a famous quote by William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. Well, I hope to help distribute it.

Matt Jarvis is a Director of Developer Relations at Snyk. Matt has spent more than 15 years building products and services around open source software, on everything from embedded devices to large scale distributed systems. Over the last decade, Matt has worked in the cloud and cloud native spaces from OpenStack, Mesos and now to Kubernetes, and now spends most of his time thinking about security. Matt is a regular speaker at conferences across the world, including KubeCon, DockerCon, FOSDEM and All Things Open, a past winner of the OpenStack Outstanding Community Contributor award, and in 2021 was named one of the Top 100 influencers in Open Technologies in the UK. Matt is also a board director of OpenUK, and the co-founder of Cloud Native Manchester, Cloud Native Edinburgh, Kubernetes Community Days UK and the virtual Cloud Natives UK.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF Ambassador as an opportunity to give back to our community, helping others to learn and contribute. I also want to expand the community in the UK and across Europe, continuing the awesome cross pollination between all of the local communities which we’ve built over the past couple of years.

Digital product leader. Speaker, author, advisor. KDC organizer in Washington, DC and Medellín, Colombia. KCD fiscal sponsor through my company NāOM Lab.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Excited to promote CNCF projects, initiatives and culture through community events and meetups.

Max is Co-Founder and Cloud Native Advocate at Liquid Reply. He is Co-Chair of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group and served 3 years at the Kubernetes release team. His focus is on designing and building cloud-native solutions on/with Kubernetes anywhere and the platform engineering to simplify the current challenges of complex systems. He runs the Munich Kubernetes Meetup as well as the Munich and Ukraine Kubernetes Community Days.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being an ambassador is a sign that working with the community and being part of the community is a high value, empowering anyone to join and be part of it. And as ambassadors, we are potentially the enabler to guide people but also motivate others to share their experiences to create a synergy. I’m also excited to meet other ambassadors in person and maybe create new ideas and events.

Michael Levan is a seasoned engineer and consultant in the Kubernetes and Platform Engineering space who spends his time working with startups and enterprises around the globe on consulting, training, and content creation. He is a trainer, 3x published author, podcast host, international public speaker, and was part of the Kubernetes v1.28 Release Team.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The avenue that’s now opened to work with more people around the world. I’ve been giving back to the community, creating free content, and contributing to projects for 5+ years. I’m now excited to work with others who are passionate about doing the same.

I am a member of the technical oversight committee for Istio, where I have worked full time for four years. I regularly contribute to the Istio blog and lead conferences like IstioCon, helping new users and veterans alike to get connected.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been unofficially doing the work of an ambassador for Istio for several years now, and look forward to continuing this work officially now that Istio has joined the CNCF.

I like hacking through software engineering problems. Over the past 3-4 years, I have been developing solutions for software reliability. I love everything around cloud-native, open source, and security. I have also founded Women in Cloud Native community for women who are interested in learning more about Cloud Native and those who are willing to learn, collaborate and support each other to grow Website – https://womenincloudnative.com/ Personal Blog – https://nancychauhan.in/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I look forward to contributing to the CNCF community as an ambassador and keep doing things I was doing before. Meeting other like-minded ambassadors and motivating each other to contribute, support, and inspire others excites me

For most of his 10+ year career, Nao has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of open source systems, including the Linux kernel, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Hyperledger. Nao is currently working on cloud native and platform services. Nao had started the CNCF/Glossary Japanese translation projects and was one of the organizers of the Cloud Native Community Japan. https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-community-japan/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I look forward to energizing the technical/non-technical community in Japan and making connections with the global community.

Noah’s career and ethos is focused around enabling Open Source contributors, and keeping the community as accessible and welcoming as possible. Currently, he focuses on enablement and mentoring of future speakers and evangelists. He has previously gotten his hands dirty doing deep DevOps work across the ecosystem, but now prefers to help the next cohort do that instead.

Noah has been involved with the CNCF since 2016, and ran the Las Vegas Kubernetes meetup for many years. He also helps with many other events from Kubecon Program Committee, to running the Contributor Summit, to smaller local events.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador so I can help as many people as possible learn, grow, and be their best selves in the Cloud Native ecosystem. It is the most human way I can think of to represent this community.

I’m Obinna Odirionye. I work on Kubernetes Tooling, Infrastructure, and Distributed Systems. I write and speak about Serverless, Containers, and Kubernetes. I am a Co-Maintainer and Member of Helm working on ChartMuseum. I write my thoughts on https://iamobinna.com

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF ambassador, I am passionate about bringing more individuals into the African ecosystem to contribute to the cloud-native community. I have seen the impact that becoming a co-maintainer and member of Helm has had on my career, and I am eager to extend these opportunities to others in my region. By leveraging the resources available through my role as a CNCF ambassador, I can support and mentor curious individuals in their transition into SRE and Kubernetes roles. My goal is to help grow the cloud-native community and positively impact my region.

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/

Orlin Vasilev aka Orlix is a Senior Community Manager and Engineer(maybe a Dev Rel or even kind a Dev Advocate) at VMware running the communities and maintainer for Project Harbor and Velero. CNCF Ambassador v1 and driving the biggest Meetup Group ~1300 members in Bulgaria. Multiple times KubeCon CfP review board member and co-chair. SysAdmin/Dev/SRE/System engineering roles for over 15 years! Located in Bulgaria, Europe! Father of two – a fantastic girl and a boy! Passionate snowboarder, DIY and semi-professional BBQ Pitmaster and baker!

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being ambassador makes your part of the most fantastic crowd in the Tech World these days. As Ambassador v1 allowed me to drive the meetup and many other local activities with universities and helping put people in general with Cloud Native technologies.

Professional Nerd, SRE and Content Creator. Love advocating for Open-Source and container technologies. I’ve been running a YouTube channel where I share and teach the technologies and good practices I use every day as an SRE.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love teaching and helping people to become better engineers. I love everything open source and what it stands for, knowledge must be shared and everyone should have the opportunity to become better at their jobs.

I am a Senior Principal Software Engineer working at Red Hat on messaging and data streaming technologies. One of these is Strimzi, a CNCF project for running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes in a cloud native manner using operators. I am also a committer on a number of IoT related projects and interested in observability and metrics – as a side project I look at how Formula 1 telemetry can be analysed with the technologies I work with every day. I am based in Napoli, where I am the lead organiser of the local CNCF Meetup.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I feel that I am one of the lucky people who love their job because it’s also their passion. Taking this passion to the community by sharing my knowledge about open source technologies is something which excites me. To be a CNCF Ambassador takes this love to the next level, being even more engaged within the cloud native space.

Paul is a Developer Advocate for the k6 OSS project at Grafana Labs. In this role, he encourages developers and testers alike to “shift left,” bringing reliability testing earlier in the software development process and taking advantage of observability tooling. As a software engineer/architect for over 20 years in varying languages, he now focuses more on the Go programming language. Active in the community, he organizes the Kubernetes & Cloud Native STL and StLGo meetup groups.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a technologist, I became enamored with cloud-native technologies as soon as I was exposed. Events like KubeCon only supercharged my excitement for the overall CNCF project landscape. As a CNCF Ambassador, I’m hoping my enthusiasm for all things cloud-native will spread to those I meet at local events. I feel this platform will allow me to become more engaged as an advocate for CNCF projects, helping the community to gain more knowledge of opportunities and to encourage more active roles in open source contributions.

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.

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 !

Raphaël Pinson is a seasoned Solutions Architect with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. He specializes in Kubernetes, Terraform, and Cilium, and currently works at Isovalent. Raphaël is passionate about bridging the gap between DevOps and Cloud Native communities, and he’s excited to represent CNCF as a co-organizer of the Swiss Romandie (Lausanne chapter) CNCF meetup and regular speaker at industry events. Raphaël has contributed to various CNCF projects. His public work can be found at https://polywork.com/raphink.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to become a CNCF ambassador because it allows me to expand my impact and bring Cloud Native technology to a wider audience. By representing CNCF and bridging the gap between Cloud Native and other communities, I hope to further advance our industry’s growth and adoption. It’s an honor to be part of a community of talented and passionate advocates who are driving innovation and making a difference in the tech world.

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.

Rey Lejano is a Field Engineer at SUSE by way of Rancher Labs and is a co-chair of Kubernetes SIG Docs and helps maintain kubernetes.io. He is a member of seven Kubernetes Release Teams including serving as the 1.23 Release Lead and 1.25 Emeritus Adviser. He leads the Kubernetes SIG Security Third-Party Security Audit subproject who helped publish the external security audit for Kubernetes v1.24 in April 2023. In 2022, he was awarded a CNCF Community Award for Top Documentarian and awarded a Kubernetes Contributor Award in 2021 from SIG Release. He is working on KCD San Francisco Bay Area and cloudnativeessentials.com to help the people to start on their cloud native journey.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Community propels open source projects to flourish. I’m excited to be an ambassador to help grow the cloud native community by providing mentorship to new contributors, guidance to those starting on their cloud native journey, and amplifying the excitement for cloud native technology.

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

Hello! I’m Robin Smorenburg, a passionate technologist with an eye for detail who turned his passion for technology into a career. Throughout my career, I’ve become a respected thought leader in the industry, sharing my knowledge and expertise with others, being recognized by Microsoft, and receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional or MVP Award in the Azure category. With Kevin Evans, I run the StreamingClouds live stream, where we engage with inspiring individuals—our industry’s thought leaders—spreading positivity and sharing their knowledge and advice. And the StreamingClouds Community is a safe place where we’re helping each other, supported by a fantastic group of moderators we can call friends.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m really excited about joining the CNCF on the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous”. Enhancing my efforts of leading by example, inspiring and helping as many people as possible while being open and inclusive, and treating everyone with the utmost respect. Making a difference through community building and mentoring, impacting the lives of others, leveling the playing field, and fostering community collaboration and relationships. And last but not least, the technologist in me loves cloud-native!

Rohit Ghumare is a recognized Google Developer Expert specializing in Google Cloud Modern Architecture, a testament to his adeptness in contemporary cloud solutions. He is the driving force behind several community-centric initiatives, orchestrating events as the organizer of DevOpsDays Bengaluru, KCD Mumbai, Google Cloud Mumbai, and the Cloud Native Thane community group. Through these platforms, he not only showcases his profound expertise but also fosters a collaborative ecosystem for knowledge exchange. A prolific writer, Rohit has authored a plethora of blogs and insightful pieces on CNCF projects, including, but not limited to, Backstage, Istio, Kubernetes, Cilium, Envoy, Prometheus, and Kiali. This extensive coverage underscores his profound understanding and engagement with cutting-edge cloud-native technologies. Besides penning down his knowledge, Rohit is dedicated to sharing his insights through the “Cloud Native Talks” podcast, which he hosts, and through global conferences and local meetups where he’s presented multiple talks. He has also been a program committee member for Kubecon co-located events. Links: devopsguys.in

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being appointed as an ambassador presents a remarkable opportunity to further extend the outreach of my engagement within the tech community, particularly in the realms of DevOps and Cloud Native technologies. It will help me to give back to the community by sharing insights from experts located all over the world.

I am Ronit Banerjee, a pre-final year Computer Science Engineering Undergraduate student. Along with my academics, I have maintained a strong portfolio being an Open Source Developer at the projects incubated and graduated from The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. My enthusiasm with DevOps and Cloud Native helped me to secure scholarships like Travel Funding Scholarship and Dan Kohn Scholarship by The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation to attend flagship conferences such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023 at Shanghai and Open Source Summit Europe 2022 at Dublin. I also worked as an Open Source Developer in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) at DBpedia Association. Apart from my technical experience, I got my hands dirty in fostering the Cloud Native Ecosystem. I am also the Chapter Lead at Cloud Native Hooghly which is an official CNCF Chapter listed amongst 40 such clubs in the Asia Pacific Region. Right now, with the proliferation of the Cloud Native Tools, I successfully turned the chapter to be the fastest growing in the entire Eastern India, catering 250+ Active members. I am also a Sig Contribex’s Comms Volunteer for Kubernetes Contributors Summit North America 2023 at Chicago, United States of America primarily looking into the “Call for Proposal” emails and notifying about the updates to the KubeCon co-located event attendees. I have significant experience in pitching tech products to Venture Capitalists and have successfully secured grants from Government of India twice for my deep-tech startup.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I always wanted to boost Cloud Native Ecosystem in my locality whereas I felt there is a gap of awareness. Being an ambassador, it would really help me to reach areas where I couldn’t do by myself just being a CNCG chapter lead of Hooghly. With CNCF’s support it would be possible.

Working as MTS3 Site Reliability Engineer at VMWare Software India PVT. LTD. Cloud Native Day Pune (CND Pune’23) Organizer Kubernetes Community Day Pune (KCD’24) Organizer Open-Source Enthusiast, A firm believer in the power of community education. Google Summer Of Code Admin since 2018, Mentor, Mentee 2022 @PEcAn Project GSoD, GSSoC, Github Externship, SIH mentor CKS | CKA | CKAD | Terraform Certified Mentored 10k+ students & professionals for free across India for career guidance, Job Search, Open Source, Cloud Native Docker & CNCG Pune community leader Enjoys photography, Acting, Teaching, Trekking, fitness

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been organising monthly meetups under CNCG Pune chapter, have been sharing my knowledge by speaking at different events, conferences, rural area colleges, schools, local meet-up groups to spread awareness and share knowledge about cloud native. By becoming CNCF Ambassador I will get more support, training, mentorship, guidance and rewards to build stronger community which will open wide door of the opportunities – to network with other community leaders, CNCF leaders and share my knowledge to wider audience. As part of CNCF Ambassador, it will give me opportunity to network with equally passionate Ambassadors from all over the globe. CNCF Ambassador gets support, mentorship, trainings, funding to host the events which will help me a lot to foster a strong community and upcoming events. It will give me the opportunity to promote Cloud Native technologies projects globally.

Sanchita is an engineering undergrad student from India who is passionate about cloud-native technologies and distributed systems. She served in the Kubernetes Release Team for several cycles and led the Release Notes Team in v1.28. Sanchita is actively involved in various CNCF projects, particularly in Kubernetes, and has contributed to the Kyverno project as an LFX mentee.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador to be able to give back to the community and help others get started on their first steps into cloud-native. I hope to make an impact and bring even more value to CNCF. I feel fortunate to have this opportunity to strengthen my ties with the community, share my knowledge and learn from others.

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.

Passionate about Virtualization, Containerization and Observability technologies, I have made it my job. Today, I accompany our customers in their #MoveToCloud transformation mainly on OnPremise environments by maximizing the use of OpenSource products. Much more than just products, OpenSource is for me a philosophy. I love to share and transmit on the subjects which impassion me, I do it with students, conferences, and also by publishing specialized blogs posts.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am very happy and excited to have joined this program. It will allow me to promote the Cloud Native more widely in France. It’s a subject that is still unknown in some companies and the specialized content is often not translated from English. My goal is to promote the power of the Cloud Native through French articles, Meetups, and conferences.

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.

Senthil works as a Software Architect, building cloud native AI/ML platforms. He specialises in Cloud native software development, Machine Learning, MLOps, Distributed Systems and Edge Computing. He has 20+ years of experience spanning Telecom, Cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, ML and MLOps. He is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Maintainer of Open-Source project “kube-fledged”, Tech Blogger, Speaker and Organizer of Kubernetes Community Days Chennai. He likes contributing to Open source, building Tech communities, exploring new technologies and mentoring Students.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The cloud native ecosystem is vast and is made up of a plethora of technologies and methodologies. Becoming a CNCF ambassador will help in bringing more focus and structure to my contribution to the community. I’ll have immense opportunities to work closely with CNCF and other Ambassadors. The Ambassador standards of excellence would serve as a north star in making my community contribution more effective. I can rely on support and guidance from CNCF to learn new ways of connecting and collaborating with the community.

Seokho Son is a senior researcher and open source special fellow at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a national research institute in South Korea. His primary responsibilities include designing systems and devising algorithms for cloud and cloud-native computing to accomplish national research projects. He is one of the maintainers of the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary which aims to define cloud native concepts in clear and simple language, and he is contributing to Kubernetes by leading the Korean localization team in Kubernetes SIG-Docs and maintaining localization in Kubernetes/website. Furthermore, he is one of the maintainers of Cloud-Barista, a multi-cloud management platform. As an open source advocate, Seokho has served as a speaker at various cloud native events, including Cloud Native Community Groups and Kubernetes Forum in South Korea, and he is actively involved in mentoring open source contribution programs in South Korea.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to have become a CNCF Ambassador and excited to continue contributing to cloud-native technology. I have been working on reducing language barriers in cloud-native technologies by localizing technical documents in Kubernetes, and maintaining the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary project to make cloud-native concepts accessible to anyone, regardless of their technical background. Through my community activities, I have had the pleasure of meeting many talented and friendly contributors, and I look forward to continue developing these relationships. I believe that being a CNCF ambassador is an extraordinary opportunity for me to spread cloud-native technologies even further. As a CNCF Ambassador, I am aiming to be a reliable source of information for the Korean community by sharing the latest technology information and community trends in a timely manner, and I hope to inspire Korean experts to get involved in global activities.

Sergio Méndez is a DevOps Engineer at Yalo and professor of operating systems at USAC university. He is getting involved students into the CNCF Ecosystem and hosting a Cloud Native Community group and KCDs in Guatemala. He has been a speaker at several conferences such as KubeCon, WTFisCloudNative, and Kubernetes Community Days. He is also a Linkerd Ambassador and author of the book Edge Computing with Kubernetes with Packt. His website is https://sergiops.xyz.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited because I can help others to learn new technologies and getting involved to participate, also gives me the opportunity to help Latinamerican people to participate in the CNCF ecosystem and students to start contributing in open source. As an Ambassador I can reduce the gap of language creating content in Spanish.

I am Shahriyar Al Mustakim Mitul, and I am currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Engineering at BRAC University. I am also the organizer of Cloud Native Bangladesh. Moreover, I am one of the maintainers for the CNCF Glossary and Kubernetes localization Project. I do organize monthly meetups on the Cloud Native Bangladesh community group. You may join the Cloud Native Bangladesh community : https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-bangladesh/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: One of my goals was to become a CNCF ambassador because I had seen ambassadors develop their skills and assist others. I have been working to close the technical and community gaps up to this point. I now have more chances than ever as an ambassador to support my local community.

Simon Forster is a cloud native technology architect and engineer based in London. Simon has extensive experience working in heavily regulated financial institutions on the design, delivery and security of critical cloud native applications. He has a specific focus on ensuring cloud native technologies deliver against business goals. As co-chair of the CNCF Cartografos Group, Simon developed and co-authored the CNCF Cloud Native Maturity Model and the CNCF children’s book “Admiral Bash’s Island Adventure”. He has contributed to both the Business Value Subcommittee and Financial Services User Group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a longtime member of the cloud native community, I’m excited to evangelise its mission. I look forward to mentoring and training members of the community, no matter the technical skill set, to better understand why cloud native serves digital innovation and meets business goals. I strongly believe that every person in the community can help drive cloud native forward and am excited to help achieve this goal.

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!

I’m OSS/Ecosystem Advocate at Sysdig, the company which created and open-sourced Falco, the Security Runtime Engine for Kubernetes and Cloud-Native technologies. I worked for Qonto, a modern banking for SMEs and freelancers, where I managed their Kubernetes clusters and the enthusiastic tools around, like ArgoCD, Traefik, Prometheus. I also assisted for many years pure-players and e-business companies for a large managed service provider, as an AWS expert and FinOps. I’m one of the longest tenured members of the Falco community, and the creator of Falcosidekick and Falcosidekick-UI, two major components of the Falco ecosystem.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an SRE for several years, I’ve been able to use a number of CNCF projects in production. I’m also one of the maintainers of the most advanced OSS security project in the landscape. I would like to help even more architects and users to integrate these projects into their infrastructures. Moreover, in 2024, the KubeCon EU will be in Paris, France, it’s important for me to do my best to help the organizers and show the vitality of French tech.

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.

Thomas Vitale is a software engineer and architect working across cloud native development and platform engineering, primarily focusing on developer experience and security. He works at Systematic (Denmark), is the author of the book “Cloud Native Spring in Action” (Manning), and is an organizer of KCD Denmark. Thomas likes contributing to open source projects in the Java and cloud native space (Spring, Keycloak, Carvel, Cartographer, Buildpacks, TAG App Delivery, Paketo), and sharing knowledge with the community. His speaking gigs include KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, KCD, Devoxx, and GOTO. Thomas also likes sharing his cloud native journey on his blog (thomasvitale.com).

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The community is probably the best part of the cloud native ecosystem. As an ambassador, I’m excited I’ll have the chance to engage even more with this fantastic community, help it grow, and empower more people to realize their goals with cloud native technologies.

Founder and PMC chair of DevStream@CNCF, ex-AWS senior DevOps, ex-Huawei tech expert, cloud architect for Daimler, Tesco, Credit Suisse, and other Fortune 500 corps. Writer at DevOps.com, guest expert at GitGuardian (DevSecOps), blog@Medium: https://medium.com/4th-coffee. Key speaker at the 1st Lisbon K8s meetup. Keynote speaker of BuildStuff 2022. I specialize in DevOps and cloud-related technologies, like CI/CD, developer tools, Terraform, AWS, etc., and I blog on DevOps/DevSecOps.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am truly excited and honored to be an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This opportunity allows me to contribute to the promotion and adoption of cutting-edge cloud-native technologies, which play a crucial role in shaping the future of software development and infrastructure. Being an ambassador also connects me with a vibrant, passionate community of professionals who share insights and experiences, fostering collaboration and innovation. I am genuinely grateful for this chance to learn from others and help drive the industry forward, making a meaningful impact on the cloud-native ecosystem.

Tom is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure API Management, leading Azure API Management’s future to allow customers to build API ecosystems in a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape with its self-hosted gateway and Azure Arc. He has been working in the cloud-native space for 5+ years. Autoscaling is in his DNA and is one of the active maintainers of Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), a CNCF Incubation project that makes application autoscaling on Kubernetes dead simple. It is scaling big enterprises such as Zapier, Reddit, FedEx, Alibaba Cloud, and many others. You can find him around on GitHub maintaining KEDA, Promitor & Azure Deprecation. He turns coffee into scalable & secure cloud systems and writes about his adventures on blog.tomkerkhove.be.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love to work with the community to build a better cloud-native community and make it easy for everyone to use it and contribute back.

Viktor Farcic is a lead rapscallion at Upbound and a published author. He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit and a co-host of DevOps Paradox.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Viktor Farcic is excited to join the CNCF Ambassadors program because he believes in the power of open source software to transform the world. He is passionate about helping others learn about and adopt CNCF technologies, and he is eager to contribute to the CNCF community in new and innovative ways. Viktor is also excited to be part of a team of dedicated and talented individuals who are working to make the world a better place through open source software.

Vineeth is a cloud, distributed systems enthusiast and maintainer to OpenTelemetry Operator, a contributor to Kubernetes, Cortex, and Open Policy Agent. He worked as a shadow for previous Kubernetes releases and was also a docs lead for Kubernetes 1.18 release. He is currently working as a Product Manager with Timescale. Previously, he was a CNCF mentee with Cortex and Open Policy Agent and a Google Summer of Code intern with The Postgres Operator. Vineeth co-founded and organizes CNCF Hyderabad meet-ups and also gave several talks on CNCF technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been in the CNCF community for almost 5 years now, learned a lot, and contributed to many projects. Looking forward to playing an active role in CNCF projects, communities and events.

I’m focused in helping customers designing, building, and running their Kubernetes and Internal Developer Platforms. I wore many hats in the IT world, Engineering, Pre-Post sales, Product Owner and Consulting. from HPC, Storage and Distributed Systems. I also enjoy volunteering at the Dutch Cloud Native/Kubernetes Meetup and the NL KCD. I have lived in many European countries and now Netherlands is the place I call home.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a CNCF Ambassador is the confirmation that my efforts towards the Open Source community are heading in the right direction. I’m excited to help the community and being supported and by the CNCF while doing it

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.

Senior cloud native architect and evangelist at Flomesh. I am a seasoned programmer, LF APAC open source evangelist, CNCF Ambassador, member of the cloud native community committee(China local) and Microsoft Azure MVP. With many years of microservice and infrastructure practice experience, mainly involving microservices, containers, Kubernetes, DevOps, etc. In the past there years, I organize two meetups in Guangzhou and Service Mesh Conference in Shanghai together with community members. In the coming April 15, I will organize KCD in Dalian with other community members. I own a Chinese blog https://atbug.com and start writing on Medium https://addozhang.medium.com.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a CNCF ambassador is a recognition of my involvement in open source and cloud-native technology promotion over the past few years. After becoming a CNCF ambassador, I can better promote CNCF technology and organize more in-person and virtual events. At the same time, I can also receive more support from CNCF.

I am a software engineer at Tencent Cloud Mesh team, specializing in the cloud-native field with a focus on Service Mesh and API Gateway technologies. I am an active contributor to the open-source community and currently maintain several CNCF projects, including Envoy, Istio, Aeraki-Mesh, and Merbridge. I had the honor of attending as a speaker at KubeCon 2023 Shanghai and am the founder of the Envoy Gateway China community, where I strive to build connections in the open-source realm. In my spare time, I share my knowledge through blog posts on www.liuxunzhuo.com and also work on recording video tutorials, with a passion for helping others and promoting cloud-native technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I am thrilled about the opportunity to further engage with the cloud-native community and contribute to its growth and development. I am excited to share my knowledge and experience in CNCF technologies, and help others understand and adopt these technologies. Being an ambassador also allows me to learn from others, stay updated with the latest trends, and continuously improve my skills. Moreover, I am passionate about promoting open-source culture and believe that being an ambassador will provide a great platform to do so. Lastly, I look forward to fostering connections and collaborations within the community, which I believe is the essence of the open-source movement.