Meet your Cloud Native Ambassadors (CNAs)!
Ambassadors are an extension of CNCF, furthering the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous” through community leadership and mentorship.
Get the latest news on the program by following CNCF Ambassadors on Twitter!
Recent Ambassador News
My KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA Chicago 2023 Experience
November 28, 2023Recapping KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023
November 22, 2023Using GitHub apps with ArgoCD
October 27, 2023CNCF Ambassadors
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Showing 176 of 208 Ambassadors
(He/Him)
Abdellfetah SGHIOUAR
(He/Him)
- Location: Stockholm, Sweden
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
I’m a Cloud Developer Advocate with Google. I co-lead the Cloud Native Compute Group of Casablanca, Morocco. I’m a co-host for the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and the Cloud Careers Podcast.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Learn from the community. Contribute to the Open Source and Cloud Native world and help inspire others to do the same
(He/Him)
Devtron Inc
Abhinav Dubey
(He/Him)
Devtron Inc
- Location: Gurugram, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, ContainerSSH, external-secrets, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kyverno
Hey, This is Abhinav from India. He is an open source enthusiast who loves to share his learnings with the community through blogs/ talks. He is also an active maintainer and contributor to open source project called Devtron (https://github.com/devtron-labs/devtron). He is passionate about exploring and working with multiple tools such as ArgoCD, Grafana, Helm, Buildpacks, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. When he’s not working, he must be planning his next adventure trip to the mountains. “Kubernetes Head with a Travelling Soul”
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Abhinav is super excited to be a CNCF Ambassador because he loves to meet and greet like-minded folks around the community and being associated with CNCF, it will open a lot of door for him. Additionally, it will help Abhinav to reach a wider number of audience that would help him to educate/ aware more number of people about Cloud Native ecosystem and tools & technologies used in it.
(He/Him)
GitLab
Abubakar Siddiq Ango
(He/Him)
GitLab
- Location: Den Haag, Netherlands
- Project Experience: Devfile, Helm, Kubernetes, metal3-io, Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Abubakar Siddiq Ango is a Developer Evangelism Program Manager at GitLab, where he finds better ways for the Developer Evangelism team to engage with the community and measure its impact. He is a Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist and when not working, he engages with the community through the CNCF, Google Developer & Hashicorp user groups and other developer communities. He is also the Lead Organizer of the Kubernetes Community Days Africa (KCD Africa), a Google Developer Expert (Cloud) and a CNCF Ambassador.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am looking forward to engaging & contributing to the community.
(He/Him)
Forrester Research
Aditya Soni
(He/Him)
Forrester Research
- Location: Jaipur, India
- Languages: English, Hindi
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, ContainerSSH, CRI-O, DevSpace, DevStream, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, Knative, Kubeflow, Kuberhealthy, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Linkerd, Litmus, Open Cluster Management, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Serverless Workflow, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Service Mesh Performance
DevOps & Cloud Engineer, Public Speaker, Tech Mentor, Lead Organizer CNCG Jaipur, OpenSource & Community Contributor, AWS Community Builder, AWS Community Leader, 1 x (AWS, GCP, Azure), 6 x RedHat, CKA, KCNA certified.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It’s been more than three years, I am being part of CNCF programs actively contributing via blogs, and public speaking on different open source DevOps/Cloud technologies at virtual and in-person events, I want to expand my learning and contribution with a wide area of peoples and uplift them with like-minded folks I can grow at the same time can share & help with my ideas to build better community bonding & culture.
(She/Her)
Lightstep
Adriana Villela
(She/Her)
Lightstep
- Location: Toronto, Canada
- Project Experience: Argo, Crossplane, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry
Adriana Villela is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Lightstep. She helps companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability, SRE, & DevOps practices. Before Lightstep, she managed a Platform Engineering team & an Observability Practices team at Tucows. Adriana has worked at various large-scale enterprises, as an individual contributor and leader, including Bank of Montreal, Ceridian, and Accenture. Adriana has a popular technical blog on Medium (https://adri-v.medium.com), is co-host of the On-Call Me Maybe Podcast (oncallmemaybe.com), and is a HashiCorp Ambassador.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Having spent a chunk of my time in the last 10 months working with OpenTelemetry, I’m excited to use my ambassadorship to amplify my voice to promote and generate excitement about OpenTelemetry to the tech community at large. At the same time, I love digging into other CNCF projects like Kubernetes and ArgoCD, and I am looking forward to using my voice to help spread knowledge and excitement for those projects as well!
(He/Him)
Solo.io
Alessandro Vozza
(He/Him)
Solo.io
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Brigade, Cilium, CoreDNS, Crossplane, Dapr, DevSpace, Istio, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Merbridge, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos
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!
(He/Him)
Canonical
Alex Jones
(He/Him)
Canonical
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, CRI-O, Crossplane, Envoy, Helm, Jaeger, k3s, Keptn, Kube-OVN, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Linkerd, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenEBS, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Rook, Volcano
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.
(He/Him)
Red Hat
Ali Ok
(He/Him)
Red Hat
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Project Experience: CloudEvents, Istio, KEDA, Knative, ko, Kubernetes, Operator Framework
Ali is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he focuses on developing and contributing to open-source software. He has a strong track record of contributions to various projects, communities, and foundations, and he is currently an active contributor to the Knative project. In addition to his technical contributions, Ali is also deeply committed to mentoring and promoting contributor growth within the CNCF community. He plays an active role in the Google Summer of Code program at CNCF, where he serves as an admin. He is also a frequent speaker on topics such as starting to contribute to open-source software and the projects he is working on.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador is an exciting opportunity for me to expand my reach and impact within the community. As someone who is already involved in mentoring and contributor growth activities at CNCF, I’m eager to use the ambassador title to promote CNCF technologies, open-source software, and help interested individuals get started with contributing to CNCF projects. Additionally, being part of a network of other CNCF Ambassadors will allow me to collaborate and share ideas with like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same things. I’m excited to be part of this community and look forward to making a meaningful impact.
(He/Him)
Alvin Estrada
(He/Him)
- Location: Guatemala
- Project Experience: Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CRI-O, Envoy, Helm, Istio, Krustlet, Kubernetes, Kuma, Prometheus, TensorFlow, WasmEdge Runtime
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.
(He/Him)
VMware
Amim Moises Salum Knabben
(He/Him)
VMware
- Location: Florianopolis, Brazil
- Project Experience: Antrea, Carvel, cert-manager, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, Envoy, etcd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Prometheus, SPIFFE
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.
(She/Her)
Lightstep
Ana Margarita Medina
(She/Her)
Lightstep
- Location: San Francisco, CA, United States
- Project Experience: Helm, Jaeger, Keptn, Kubernetes, Litmus, OpenTelemetry
Ana Margarita Medina is a Staff Developer Advocate at Lightstep, where she speaks on all things SRE, DevOps, and Reliability, and is a podcast host for On-Call Me, Maybe (oncallmemaybe.com). She is a self-taught engineer with over 12 years of experience, focusing on cloud infrastructure and reliability in the last few. She is also part of the Kubernetes Release Team (v1.25 – v1.27) and has been advising CNCF’s Keptn (keptn.sh) project since 2019. When time permits her, she leads efforts to dispel the stigma surrounding mental health and bring more Black and Latinx folks into tech.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I want to continue giving back to the CNCF community, I see this as another great opportunity to connect with other developers (open source and end users) and learn about their struggles with current tooling to help shape where this industry moves toward. I’m also very excited to empower others to see that they too belong in tech, that there is space for them to work in cloud-native, and become open-source contributors, and for folks to join in and help us grow this community and build responsible tech.
(She/Her)
Boer Technology
Ananda Dwi Rahmawati
(She/Her)
Boer Technology
- Location: Yogyakarta, Indonesia
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Konveyor, KubeArmor, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Litmus, Longhorn, Network Service Mesh, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Policy Containers, Open Service Mesh, OpenEBS, OpenELB, OpenFeature, OpenGitOps, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Porter, Prometheus, rkt, Rook, Submariner, TensorFlow, Thanos, Vitess, Volcano
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.
(He/Him)
Freelance - Crossover Engineering B.V.
Andrea Giardini
(He/Him)
Freelance - Crossover Engineering B.V.
- Location: Paris, France
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, cert-manager, containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, etcd, external-secrets, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
Andreas Grabner
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
- Location: Linz, Austria
- Project Experience: Argo, CloudEvents, Helm, Jaeger, Keptn, Kubernetes, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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
(He/Him)
Ankur Kothiwal
(He/Him)
- Location: Devprayag, India
- Project Experience: Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CRI-O, etcd, Falco, gRPC, Helm, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her/They/Them)
Microsoft
Annie Talvasto
(She/Her/They/Them)
Microsoft
- Location: Zürich, Switzerland
- Project Experience: Flux, Helm, KEDA, Kubernetes, KUDO, Kyverno, Linkerd, Meshery
Annie Talvasto is an award-winning international technology speaker & marketing leader. She has been recognised with the CNCF Ambassador & Azure MVP awards. Annie has been a co-organizer of Kubernetes & CNCF Finland meetup since 2017 and has spoken at technology conferences across the world, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Microsoft Build & Ignite, KCDC and NDC. Annie also has hosted Cloud Native Live, a weekly livestream by CNCF, since 2021.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I believe in the positive impact open source technology and CNCF projects have in the world, and I am excited to continue spreading the word about them!
(He/Him)
Anurag Kumar
(He/Him)
- Location: Kolkata, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Carvel, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, Emissary-ingress, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, ko, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Kubewarden, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus, Telepresence, zot
I’m contributor and maintainer of KubeArmor (A CNCF runtime security project). I’m interested in Kubernetes Security. You can read my blogs here https://kranurag.dev
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador because I’ll try to bring and educate more people towards CNCF ecosystem. CNCF is one of the most welcoming community. I also want to share my knowledge when it comes to Kubernetes and other CNCF projects to new peoples who’re getting started. Finally, I would love to meet and connect with fellow CNCF ambassadors.
(He/Him)
Okteto
Arsh Sharma
(He/Him)
Okteto
- Location: Panchkula, India
- Languages: English, Hindi
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Crossplane, Helm, Kubernetes, Kyverno
Arsh currently serves as the New Contributor Ambassador for the Documentation Special Interest Group of the Kubernetes project and mentors new folks in the community. He has also led the CI Signal Team in the 1.25 Kubernetes Release. Previously, he was also an active contributor to other CNCF projects, including cert-manager and Kyverno. Arsh has written blogs and spoken about different topics in the cloud-native ecosystem at various conferences before. Recordings of some of his talks can be found at: https://arshsharma.com/speaking/
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I owe a lot to open source and the CNCF open source community in particular. I’m excited to be an ambassador to be able to give back to the community and help others get started on their journey of contributing! As someone who has firsthand witnessed the benefits in personal and professional life thanks to the community, I want others to be able to share these joys as well.
(He/Him)
Aryat Khayretdinov
(He/Him)
- Location: Montreal, Canada
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, containerd, CoreDNS, Crossplane, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Lima, Linkerd, NATS, Notary, OpenCost, OpenEBS, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Thanos, The Update Framework (TUF), Vitess, WasmEdge Runtime
Ayrat (Archy) is a CNCF Ambassador, Cloud Native Tech Professor at Mcgill University and Cloud Native Architect at Google Cloud. As a CNCF Ambassador he has an opportunity to educate people and share knowledge about benefits of Cloud Native ecosystem via CNCF and Kubernetes Meetups, workshops or by helping customers to build modern cloud native applications that can run seamlessly on-prem or any cloud provider. Archy is passionate about community, he is a Founder and lead organizer of Canadian CNCF Meetups (Virtual, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Waterloo, Halifax) and frequent speaker GDG, CNCF Meetups and CNCF related conferences. He is an organizer of Canadian Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs), Cloud Native Days Canada 2019 and GDG Cloud & AI DevFest 2019.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: To be part of amazing team of Ambassadors provides you opportunity to learn from other experts and meet new friends across the world who is passionate about same technology. Being Ambassador also gives you a life time opportunity to meet and learn with Cloud Native Community at Kubecons. Give back to community by organizing K8s Meetups, KCDs and sharing the knowledge with wider community.
(He/Him)
InfraCloud Technologies
Atulpriya Sharma
(He/Him)
InfraCloud Technologies
- Location: Hyderabad, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Fluentd, Istio, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry
I’m a tester turned developer advocate. I work on & talk about Cloud native, Kubernetes & DevOps. I also create content – blog posts, Twitter threads – & host Twitter spaces. In addition, I’m one of the organiser of CNCF Hyderabad and strongly believe in collaborative learning and growth. When I am not working, I’m a food & travel blogger & love exploring eateries & going on road trips. You can find me at @TheTechMaharaj on Twitter.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am absolutely stoked to be a CNCF ambassador! Being a part of this community means I get to geek out with a group of like-minded individuals who are passionate about Cloud native technologies, Kubernetes, and DevOps. It’s an opportunity to keep learning and growing, while also sharing my knowledge and enthusiasm with people in Hyderabad. I’m excited to dive headfirst into the latest trends and developments, all while having a blast! I can’t wait to host fun events, share cool content, and help spread the word about CNCF and related technologies. Overall, this is not just a chance to contribute to a thriving ecosystem, but to also make connections, learn new things, and have a ton of fun along the way!
(She/Her)
OVHcloud
Aurélie Vache
(She/Her)
OVHcloud
- Location: Toulouse, France
- Project Experience: Argo, etcd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, Knative, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Linkerd, NATS, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Barun Acharya
(He/Him)
- Location: Ghaziabad, India
- Project Experience: Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CRI-O, Falco, gRPC, Helm, k3s, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Kyverno, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Service Mesh Interface (SMI)
Barun likes hacking on low level stuff and fiddling around developer toolings. He maintains KubeArmor, a CNCF Sandbox project and currently works as a Software Engineer at Accuknox. He loves to talk about Open Source and has been associated with programs like Google Summer of Code and LFX Mentorship. Find his blogs at https://barun.cc
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador has heightened my enthusiasm to further promote, educate, and support the cloud-native community. Leveraging my prior experience as a speaker and maintainer, I am now even better positioned to advocate for and strengthen the ecosystem through advocacy and knowledge sharing.
(He/Him)
Trendyol
Batuhan Apaydın
(He/Him)
Trendyol
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Buildpacks, cert-manager, containerd, Dex, Falco, Flux, Harbor, Helm, in-toto, ko, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Lima, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS, SPIFFE, SPIRE, zot
Batuhan Apaydın a.k.a. developer-guy has been very active in the Software Supply Chain Security space. He is eager to learn more about it in all aspects because he knows this topic will become one of the utmost critical topics that everybody has to be concerned about. Towards that direction, he won the “Best Sigstore Evangelist” award and wrote a blog post about it to encourage to the next one and took an active role in the first-ever SigstoreCon by being one of the Program Committee members of the event and created a Twitter Community about Software Supply Chain Security and that community is now about 500+ people joined. He is also selected as Docker Captain Program 2023. In addition to that he is also a CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Ambassador 2023. He also tries to be active in Turkey by organizing in-person, and virtual meetups, and workshops. He is the organizer of two important organizations in Turkey named DevOpsTr, CNCF Istanbul Chapter, and Cloud Native Turkiye. He is also one of the organizers of the KCD Turkey. He is also an active contributor to several CNCF projects including Ko, Flux, and Kyverno. He also enjoys writing technical blog posts and wrote 10+ blog posts and all of which are published on important official websites including Kyverno, CD Foundation, Flux, Sigstore, etc. • https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/10/18/tekton-chains/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/10/prove-the-authenticity-of-oci-artifacts/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/08/manage-kyverno-policies-as-ocirepositories/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/11/verify-the-integrity-of-the-helm-charts-stored-as-oci-artifacts-before-reconciling-them-with-flux/ • https://kubesimplify.com/the-secret-gems-behind-building-container-images-enter-buildkit-and-docker-buildx • https://blog.kubesimplify.com/getting-started-with-ko-a-fast-container-image-builder-for-your-go-applications • https://nirmata.com/securing_base_images/ • https://blog.sigstore.dev/how-to-verify-container-images-with-kyverno-using-kms-cosign-and-workload-identity-1e07d2b85061
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: First of all, I’m the first person from Turkey who has been selected as a CNCF Ambassador which is super great for me because I have the energy to spread all my knowledge with other people and I do really like to collaborate with people by organizing in-person, virtual meetups. I thought that I can waste my time and energy by becoming a CNCF Ambassador still continue organizing meetups and sharing knowledge because Turkiye has great potential of using CNCF projects to solve problems.
(He/Him)
SECTION6
BMK Lakshminarayanan
(He/Him)
SECTION6
- Location: Wellington, New Zealand
- Project Experience: DevSpace, Envoy, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, NATS, Service Mesh Interface (SMI)
Transformation Architect, SECTION6 BMK is an inspiring and passionate DevOps Advocate and Value Stream Architect promoting DevOps, Lean and Value Stream Management principles & practices. He is also a New Zealand ambassador for the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), DevOps Institute and a Board Advisor for the Value Stream Management consortium(VSMC). He hosts the CNCF meetup in Wellington, New Zealand and is co-chair of Cloud-Native Summit A/NZ. He blogs about his experiences and learnings at https://bmk.nz/
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: 1. Promoting Open Source and Cloud-Native projects and ecosystem tools in our community. 2. Connecting with experts, maintainers, contributors and other Opensource and cloud-native thought leaders to amplify my learning 3. Use the ambassador program and help in bringing in the best to my community in terms of cloud-native learnings, education and training.
(He/Him)
Bob Killen
(He/Him)
- Location: Minneapolis, MN, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, Dex, etcd, Helm, Istio, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, TensorFlow, Volcano
Bob is a Program Manager at the Google Open Source Programs Office with a focus on Cloud Native computing. He serves the Kubernetes project as a Steering Committee member and chair of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group and has been involved in many other cross-cutting areas of the project. Bob comes from an academic background, spending 15 years at the University of Michigan with a later focus on computational research. He is passionate about Academic Outreach, and is an outspoken advocate of Open Source, Open Science and pets of the furry 4 legged variety.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Just happy to be a part of the new program and help other ambassadors 🙂
(He/Him)
Basiq
Brad McCoy
(He/Him)
Basiq
- Location: Coolum Beach, Australia
- Languages: English, Spanish
- Project Experience: Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, cert-manager, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Crossplane, Falco, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, Keptn, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Bret Fisher
(He/Him)
- Location: Virginia Beach, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Distribution, Helm, Kubernetes, OpenGitOps
For 25 years, I’ve built and operated distributed systems and helped over a million people learn dev and ops topics. I’m also a Docker Captain and the creator of the wildly popular Docker & Kubernetes Mastery series on Udemy. I provide DevOps-style consulting, workshops, a popular DevOps Discord server, a container-focused YouTube channel, and a podcast. I basically spend my days helping people and giving high fives.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I think DevOps culture and container tech have changed the IT Pro and Developer world forever! For over eight years, I’ve been a megaphone for container tech and love teaching cloud native DevOps topics. The CNCF community has been a great experience for me both as a teacher and a learner, and I want to make sure it’s great for many years to come.
(She/Her)
Shopify Inc.
Cailyn Edwards
(She/Her)
Shopify Inc.
- Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, CoreDNS, Crossplane, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, gRPC, Helm, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Vitess
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!
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(She/Her/They/Them)
Isovalent
Carla Gaggini
(She/Her/They/Them)
Isovalent
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
Carla has been managing events and communities since 2011. She started with experimental music festivals and eventually ended up in Tech, where she fell in love with its ecosystem. During her career she has produced and run many conferences (yes, also the virtual ones!), meetups, webinars and hackathons. Formerly at Container Solutions managing everything “WTF is Cloud Native” and “Software Circus”, she currently buzzes around Cilium and eBPF at Isovalent. She is also one of the organisers of KCD UK, a CNCF and OpenUK Ambassador, and the 2022 CNCF Marketing Committee Chair. Carla drinks way too much tea (mainly green), has an unhealthy obsession for Japan and a big passion for art, music, cinema, philosophy and fashion. Recent blogs: https://blog.container-solutions.com/why-your-event-needs-a-code-of-conduct-and-you-need-to-enforce-it https://blog.container-solutions.com/how-hard-is-it-to-deliver-a-virtual-conference https://blog.container-solutions.com/tech-events-in-the-time-of-covid-19-5-tips-to-survive
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: This is an invaluable opportunity to support the CNCF and the Cloud Native community. I’m incredibly excited to help new joiners and spread more awareness around all the initiatives they can embrace within the CNCF, the various KCDs and the Cloud ecosystem in general.
(He/Him)
AWS
Carlos Santana
(He/Him)
AWS
- Location: Raleigh, NC, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Flux, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her)
Carolina Valencia
(She/Her)
- Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Project Experience: Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Falco, Helm, Kubernetes, Kubescape
Carol is an enthusiastic software developer focused on the practices of secure cloud native. She collaborates in open-source projects and contributes to the Kubernetes project. Currently residing in Sao Paulo, Brazil and collaborates with local events. In her free time, she enjoys running, playing beach tennis and watching history documentaries.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: – The opportunity to establish meaningful relationships with like-minded individuals who are interested in shared knowledge – Contributing to the community by sharing knowledge and announcements inside my local area and social media, to help us to develop ourselves. – Learning and growing together with the community, leveraging the collective knowledge and experiences of its members to foster personal development.
(He/Him)
Raft
Chad Crowell
(He/Him)
Raft
- Location: Austin, TX, United States
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, CubeFS, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Linkerd, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Service Mesh Performance, Thanos, Virtual Kubelet
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.
(He/Him)
Chamod Perera
(He/Him)
- Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, containerd, Envoy, etcd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
PingCAP
Chao Zheng
(He/Him)
PingCAP
- Location: Santa Clara, United States
- Project Experience: Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, Crossplane, etcd, Kubernetes, OpenYurt, TiKV
Chao is a highly skilled cloud native technology professional with over 5 years of experience working on and contributing to several CNCF projects, including Kubernetes, OpenYurt, TiKV, and ChaosMesh. Chao is a passionate advocate of open source technology and regularly speak at events such as KubeCon and cloud native meetups. Additionally, Chao is a cohost and organizer of various cloud native meetups, including Cloud Native @ Scale and the Bay Area Cloud Native Infra Meetup.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador for a few reasons. It is a great honor to join a group of enthusiastic open source advocators who are dedicated to advancing the field of cloud native technology. Also, I find it exciting to connect with people who share my passion for this technology and can share insights and perspectives that help drive innovation. Last but not least, I am eager to use my skills, experience, and passion to contribute more to the cloud native community and help others unlock the full potential of the cloud native technology. Being an ambassador provides me with a platform to give back to the community, collaborate with individuals share same passion, and help drive the growth and adoption of cloud native technology.
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
David Hirsch
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
- Location: Linz, Austria
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
David Peter Hirsch is a Program Manager at Dynatrace’s Open Source Program Office, where he oversees the company’s open source initiatives. He is responsible for driving compliance and security efforts around open source software within the company, as well as supporting the creation and contribution to new open source projects. David also supports projects in their early stages, helping drive adoption and community development for Keptn, OpenFeature, and OpenTelemetry, and works closely with the engineering teams to ensure their success. David is a member of the InnerSource Commons and TODO Group, and he fosters collaboration with foundations and participation in the community and conferences. He is an enthusiastic advocate for open source software and is particularly interested in the intersection of open source and artificial intelligence. Currently, he is working towards his MBA and a degree in Artificial Intelligence to further his knowledge and expertise in these areas. Through his work and studies, David is helping to promote the growth and development of open source software and its impact on the tech industry as a whole.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to become a CNCF ambassador because I believe in the power of this community to make a positive impact on the world. By supporting open source projects and encouraging adoption, I can help ensure that more people and organizations benefit from the values of open source software. In addition, I’m passionate about promoting open source to young students in Europe. By encouraging them to get involved, I can help create a new generation of open source enthusiasts who are equipped with the skills and knowledge to succeed in the tech industry. Overall, I’m excited to contribute my time and energy to this important cause and to help make a difference in the world of open source.
(He/Him)
Di Xu
(He/Him)
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, CubeFS, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, Karmada, KEDA, Kubernetes, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Lima, Open Cluster Management, OpenKruise, OpenTelemetry, Pixie, Thanos, TiKV, Vineyard, Virtual Kubelet, Volcano
Di Xu is passionate about open source projects and get involved in. He is a top-60 code contributor in Kubernetes community and founds CNCF Sandbox project Clusternet. He is also an avid speaker and has spoken many times at open source conferences and meetups, including KubeCon, Open Source Summit, etc. Nowadays he is specialized in cloud native, Kubernetes and infrastructure.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been an active member of the Kubernetes community since 2016. I am eager to become a CNCF Ambassador to give back to the open source community and help drive cloud native adoption. My practical experience with CNCF technologies can provide valuable insights to users. As an ambassador, I look forward to mentoring new contributors, staying connected to the latest developments, speaking at events, creating tutorials, and connecting with the cloud native community. This role aligns well with my passion for open source software and interest in emerging cloud native technologies. I am excited by the opportunity to contribute meaningfully as an ambassador, share my knowledge with others and help advance the CNCF ecosystem.
(She/Her)
SUSE
Divya Mohan
(She/Her)
SUSE
- Location: Mumbai, India
- Project Experience: k3s, Kubernetes, Kubewarden
Divya is a Senior Technical Evangelist at SUSE, where she contributes to Rancher’s cloud native open source projects. She co-chairs the documentation for the Kubernetes & LitmusChaos projects & has previously worked extensively in the systems engineering space during her tenure with HSBC & IGate Global Solutions Pvt Ltd. A co-creator of the KCNA exam & a CNCF ambassador, she is invested in making technical communities & technologies more accessible & inclusive.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been an ambassador previously & I am aware of the impact that we have on the community. I’m excited to help out in making the community inclusive & accessible for everyone, irrespective of their skill level, where they are at in their career, or where they are from location-wise.
(He,His)
Isovalent
Duffie Cooley
(He,His)
Isovalent
- Location: San Francisco, CA, United States
- Languages: English
- Project Experience: Antrea, Cilium, CNI-Genie, Confidential Containers, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, Dex, etcd, external-secrets, Helm, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, rkt
Duffie is a member of the CNCF Technology Oversight Committee and speaks on a number of topics ranging from Kuberenetes to security and networking.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador as I really enjoy helping others navigate our community. Helping them feel welcome and learning from them as we all lift each other up!
(He/Him)
Vinted
Edgaras Apsega
(He/Him)
Vinted
- Location: Vilnius, Lithuania
- Project Experience: Argo, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, etcd, Falco, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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!
(She/Her)
Percona
Edith Puclla
(She/Her)
Percona
- Location: Ayacucho, Peru
- Project Experience: containerd, Kubernetes, Kyverno
Edith is a Tech Evangelist at Percona Corporation, an open source contributor, and Docker Captain. She is a Docker and Kubernetes enthusiast who loves to create visual content. She became certified in KCNA and created a guide for others to become certified, too https://github.com/edithturn/KCNA-training. She also was a speaker at Docker Community All hands # 7, where she shared her experience in creating a Docker extension for Hoppscotch https://www.youtube.com / watch?V=uGADVJTodYE&t=14s
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because I like exploring the CNCF ecosystems and having fun doing it. It’s also rewarding to share content with the community and meet people from all over the world. Thanks to the community, I have obtained many opportunities in my professional career, and now it is time to give back.
(He/Him)
Spacelift
Emin Alemdar
(He/Him)
Spacelift
- Location: Izmir, Turkey
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, Crossplane, Envoy, etcd, external-secrets, Falco, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Linkerd, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Thanos
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.
Chronosphere
Eric D Schabell
Chronosphere
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Project Experience: Argo, containerd, CRI-O, Fluentd, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Operator Framework, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her)
Faseela K
(She/Her)
- Location: Aachen, Germany
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Envoy, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes
Faseela is a cloud-native developer, maintainer and steering committee member at Istio Service Mesh. She has served as the Program Chair for the Istio Meetups in 2023 including the IstioDays co-located with KubeCon Europe and NorthAmerica. She regularly contributes to the Istio blogs, helping all the latest news about Istio reach users and contributors worldwide.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Having done the work of an ambassador for Istio for several years now, I look forward to continuing this work officially now, making use of the support CNCF provides. I would love to provide more support for the women in cloud native community with this new opportunity I am provided with.
(He/Him)
Feynman Zhou
(He/Him)
- Location: Beijing, China
- Project Experience: Kubernetes, Notary, ORAS
Feynman is a product manager for Microsoft Azure. He is also a maintainer for CNCF ORAS and Notary Project. He is a big fan of open source and has been contributing to multiple CNCF projects over five years. He is a speaker of KubeCon and enjoy technology advocacy. He also hosted several events, such as Kubernetes Community Days China, CNCF Webinar, and cloud native meetups.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m super excited to be part of the Cloud Native Ambassadors family. I would like to work with other ambassador peers to learn and share cloud-native technologies.
(She/Her)
Alibaba Cloud
Fog Dong
(She/Her)
Alibaba Cloud
- Location: Hangzhou, China
- Project Experience: Argo, Dex, etcd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, Nocalhost, Open Cluster Management, OpenKruise, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Frederico Muñoz
(He/Him)
- Location: Lisbon, Portugal
- Project Experience: Argo, Confidential Containers, Fluentd, Helm, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Prometheus, TensorFlow
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.
(She/Her)
University of Waterloo
Grace Nguyen
(She/Her)
University of Waterloo
- Location: Waterloo, ON, Canada
- Project Experience: Helm, in-toto, Kubernetes
Grace is an engineering undergrad at the University of Waterloo and has experience in DevOps and security. She has been a member of the Kubernetes Release Team through various roles for almost 2 years. She is also a contributor to SIG-security. Grace is also involved in supporting diversity in tech, venture capital and various other shenanigans.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Everything I know about open-source, I learned through the cloud-native community. The amount of expertise, and more importantly care, that this community possesses is paramount. I’m excited to continue this tradition of excellence and onboard the next generation of open-source contributors, especially those still in school and underrepresented in tech.
(He/Him)
Komodor
Guy Menahem
(He/Him)
Komodor
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, cert-manager, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kyverno, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Halil Ibrahim BUGOL
(He/Him)
- Location: Istanbul, Turkey
- Project Experience: Antrea, Argo, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Chaosblade, Cilium, containerd, ContainerSSH, Falco, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, Karmada, KEDA, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Kuma, Litmus, Longhorn, Nocalhost, Open Service Mesh, OpenEBS, OpenELB, OpenFunction, OpenTelemetry, Porter, Prometheus, Rook, Serverless Workflow, Strimzi, TensorFlow, Virtual Kubelet, wasmCloud
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 🙂
(He/Him)
Melio AI
Harry Lee
(He/Him)
Melio AI
- Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Dex, Envoy, external-secrets, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Rook, Telepresence
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.
(He/Him)
Harsh Manvar
(He/Him)
- Location: Rajkot, India
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, Envoy, Fluentd, Flux, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Strimzi, TensorFlow, Thanos, WasmEdge Runtime
I am a distinguished Docker Captain based in India, recognized for my expertise in containerization and cloud technologies. As a Cloud Innovator Champion, I’m committed to driving innovation and best practices in cloud computing. Additionally, i am a Top Kubernetes answerer worldwide on StackOverflow, demonstrating my dedication to fostering knowledge sharing within the global tech community.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF ambassador is thrilling because it means actively shaping the future of cloud-native technologies, collaborating with industry leaders, and bridging gaps in the tech ecosystem. It’s an opportunity to contribute to a global community that’s driving innovation and setting standards for modern computing.
(She/Her)
Shri Shankaracharya Technical Campus
Harshita Sao
(She/Her)
Shri Shankaracharya Technical Campus
- Location: Rajnandgaon, India
- Project Experience: Cilium, Helm, Istio, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Megazone
Hoon Jo
(He/Him)
Megazone
- Location: Seoul, South Korea
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
Hoon Jo is a Cloud Native and Cloud Solutions Architect at Megazone soft. He had several presentations on cloud-native technologies in Ubucon Asia, Openinfra Asia, HashiTalks, Openstack & Kubernetes Korea and so on. And he relays valuable information from the global to local community and makes clips to understand easily in Korea. My interests are highly are kubernetes and related cloud native products. I am fully sure cloud-native help to change the world as well as business model efficient way. Here is my channel. – Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/HoonJo/ – Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HoonJo
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: In my view, Korea is not rapidly catching up with the latest information from worldwide due to the language barrier and other reasons. Thus, I hope I will relay a lot of highly valuable information from cloud-native resources to Korean communities. Plus, if cloud-native resources could be better digested after cooking, I will cook them to bite easily, such as clips. As an ambassador, it pushes me to be more active and be responsible. It is a really exciting journey in 2023 🙂 hopefully.
(He/Him)
Independent
Hrittik Roy
(He/Him)
Independent
- Location: Kolkata, India
- Project Experience: Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, The Update Framework (TUF)
Hrittik is currently a pre-final undergrad, who has previously worked at various startups helping them scale their content efforts. He loves diving deep into distributed systems and creating articles on them and has spoken at conferences such as Azure Cloud Summit, UbuCon Asia and Kubernetes Community Days – Lagos and Chennai among others! His best days are when he finds ways to create impact in the communities he’s a part of either by code, content, or mentorship! Blogs: https://hrittikhere.github.io/blogs/ Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/hrittikhere Credly: https://credly.com/users/hrittikhere
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being an ambassador will help me continue the work I do and, moreover, it will help me meet new people and discover new opportunities. With the support from CNCF, I also plan to expand the cloud native community in my local region and finally get into video content. I also plan to post a few articles on the CNCF blog (like this: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/03/13/how-to-use-kubernetes-events-for-effective-alerting-and-monitoring/) and continue creating content in the form of articles.
(He/Him)
Tencent Cloud
Huabing Zhao
(He/Him)
Tencent Cloud
- Location: Chengdu, China
- Project Experience: Aeraki Mesh, Envoy, Istio, Kubernetes
Hi, I’m Huabing Zhao, founder of the CNCF open-source project Aeraki Mesh(https://aeraki.net). I’m passionate about Cloud-Native technologies like Microservices, Kubernetes, and Service Mesh. I share my thoughts on Cloud-Native technologies through my blog(https://zhaohuabing.com https://medium.com/@zhaohuabing). When I’m not working, I enjoy watching movies, swimming, hiking, travelling, and skateboarding.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to be a CNCF ambassador because it’s an opportunity for me to share my passion for Cloud-Native technologies with others who are interested in this space. In the meatime, I have the chance to connect with other experts in this field and learn from them.
(He/Him)
Hangzhou HarmonyCloud Technology Co., Ltd
Huan Wei
(He/Him)
Hangzhou HarmonyCloud Technology Co., Ltd
- Location: Hangzhou, China
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Chaosblade, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Envoy, Falco, Fluentd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Karmada, KEDA, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Prometheus, Volcano
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.
(She/Her)
Netease
hui zhang
(She/Her)
Netease
- Location: HangZhou, China
- Project Experience: Chaos Mesh, Curve, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, OpenTracing
I started my career in cloud-native technology as a test developer for related software products in 2017. Last year, I became a Senior Operation Manager at NetEase Open Source Program Office, which focuses mainly on open-source community governance. I have my own public account where I usually publish some articles about analyzing the source code of Kubernetes. At present, I mainly work on the distributed storage system Curve, but I am also interested in Chaos Engineering(https://chaos-mesh.org/zh/blog/page/3/), Kubernetes, and Engineering efficiency. I was invited to participate in the 2020 Cloud Native Day, 4-5 of the industry’s more famous cloud-native meetups, and successfully hosted 5-6 cloud-native meetups.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The only way to the future of basic software is Open Source. Open Source visualizes trust. Trust is everything.
(He/Him)
Humble Devassy Chirammal
(He/Him)
- Location: Kerala, India
- Project Experience: Argo, containerd, CRI-O, etcd, gRPC, Helm, Istio, k3s, K8up, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Rook
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.
(He/Him)
Hung-Ying Tai
(He/Him)
- Location: Taipei, Taiwan
- Project Experience: containerd, CRI-O, Kubernetes, Lima, WasmEdge Runtime
I am the maintainer of WasmEdge Runtime and an active mentor in LFX mentorship. I am enthusiastic about sharing how to leverage the WebAssembly technology with the Cloud Native ecosystem, including giving talks at the conference[1] and hosting online tutorials [2]. [1]: https://kccnceu2023.sched.com/event/6c0f559281122a74f5292f3d05b5936e?iframe=no#video_stream [2]: https://coscup.org/2023/zh-TW/session/EFYC8R I am going to have more tutorials and information related to Cloud Native+Wasm on my personal blog (https://hyd.ai). Stay tuned!
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: WebAssembly is new for the Cloud Native ecosystem. I’m excited to join the CNCF ambassador community this year to promote the connection between Could Native software and Wasm and bring this knowledge to local communities and university clubs/courses in Taiwan.
(He/Him)
Iceber Gu
(He/Him)
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Clusterpedia, containerd, Harbor, Helm, k3s, Karmada, kube-rs, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, NATS, Open Policy Agent (OPA), wasmCloud
I love open source and am involved in many CNCF projects such as Containerd, Kubernetes,Kubeedge, WasmCloud & KasmCloud. I also created Clusterpedia and promoted its contribution to the CNCF Sandbox project. I organized KCD Beijing and KCD Shenzhen in China, and have been a speaker at Kubecon and many other events. I maintain my blog at https://icebergu.com/ and when I have time I share my thoughts on technology!
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am delighted to be a CNCF Ambassador. I am very grateful to CNCF for recognizing my work in the cloud native community. The influence of being a CNCF Ambassador allows me to better promote cloud-native technologies and the CNCF projects, make it easier to organize cloud-native events, and attract more people to participate in cloud-native construction. I will make more contributions to CNCF as an ambassador!
(He/Him)
Container Solutions
Ileriayo Adebiyi
(He/Him)
Container Solutions
- Location: Lagos, Nigeria
- Languages: English, Yoruba
- Project Experience: Argo, Falco, Helm, k3s, Kubernetes
Ileriayo is a Certified Kubernetes Developer, Administrator, and Security Specialist (CKAD, CKA, CKS) with a passion for people and technology. A KCD co-organizer committed to the growth of Africa. A teacher who takes pleasure in democratizing complex technical concepts. He is the creator of Get Going With Kubernetes, which consists of book reading and a series of workshops to help people learn Kubernetes.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The adoption of Cloud Native in Africa has been quite low compared to other regions. Becoming an ambassador provides me the opportunity to champion the adoption, development, and growth of Cloud Native on a bigger scale in Africa.
Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/ileriayo
(She/Her)
Irvi Firqotul Aini
(She/Her)
- Location: Singapore
- Project Experience: KubeEdge, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, NATS, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Telepresence, TensorFlow, wasmCloud
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.
(He/Him)
Aqua Security
Itay Shakury
(He/Him)
Aqua Security
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
- Languages: English, Hebrew
- Project Experience: Falco, Harbor, in-toto, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Policy Containers, ORAS, Pixie, Prometheus
Itay Shakury is VP Open Source at Aqua Security, where he leads engineering and strategy of open source, cloud native, security solutions. Itay has some 20 years of professional experience in various software development, architecture and product management roles. Itay had initiated several local technical communities and events, including the successful CNCF Tel Aviv meetup group.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m honored to be recognized as a CNCF Ambassador, and join this amazing team of worldwide experts. To me, the CNCF is an intersection between two passions of mine – technology and community, which I have been pursuing since early in my career. I’m excited to continue to collaborate with the various technical working groups, events, projects and initiatives that the CNCF ecosystem continuously generates.
(He/Him)
SIGHUP
Jacopo Nardiello
(He/Him)
SIGHUP
- Location: Milano, Italy
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, CRI-O, etcd, Helm, Kubernetes, Kuma, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
DiveInto
James Spurin
(He/Him)
DiveInto
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, etcd, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Knative, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, NATS
With over 25 years of experience, James Spurin is an industry veteran skilled in various technical fields and adept at leading Engineering teams in top-tier Financial Services organisations. He now focuses on creating online courses and Technical Educational Content in areas such as DevOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud Native, incorporating hands-on learning experiences through container-based lab environments and has reached over 100,000 students globally. As a CNCF Ambassador, James actively advocates for Container and Cloud Native knowledge, education, and Kubernetes-based orchestration. His company, DiveInto, champions Cloud Native and consistently shares fresh content on its YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/DiveInto James has also established an inclusive community dedicated to Cloud Native learning, which can be accessed at https://community.diveinto.com
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be a CNCF Ambassador as it aligns perfectly with my passion for creating technical educational content on Cloud Native/Kubernetes whilst also Giving Back, a core-principle of the CNCF. The role supports me in more actively engaging with a diverse global community, enabling me to learn from others whilst also sharing my own knowledge and expertise. As an Ambassador, I will contribute to thought leadership in the cloud native space and hope to provide an instrumental role in fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, learning and innovation. Throughout this journey, I am also eager to support and encourage others in pursuing CNCF Cloud Native certifications – an endeavour I am both passionate about and an advocate for. Overall, being a CNCF Ambassador is a highly rewarding and fulfilling experience that allows me to give back to the community while staying updated on the latest developments in the field.
(He/Him)
Tencent
Jesse Meng
(He/Him)
Tencent
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, CloudEvents, containerd, Contour, CoreDNS, Envoy, etcd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Karmada, KEDA, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, OpenCost, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Rook, Serverless Devs, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Virtual Kubelet, Volcano
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.
(She/Her)
Kognic
Jessica Andersson
(She/Her)
Kognic
- Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
- Languages: English, Swedish
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, external-secrets, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
Jim Angel
(He/Him)
- Location: Austin, TX, United States
- Languages: English
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, Dex, Dragonfly, Envoy, etcd, external-secrets, Falco, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Knative, ko, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, metal3-io, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Tinkerbell
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.
(He/Him)
Jimmy Song
(He/Him)
- Location: Beijing, China
- Project Experience: Argo, Istio, Kubernetes
Jimmy Song(宋净超) is a developer advocate at Tetrate and founder of Cloud Native Community(China). He is an outstanding blogger and author of cloud native technical books. You can know him better from his blog jimmysong.io
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I used to be the second Chinese to join the CNCF Ambassador program and then the CNCF Ambassador changed the rules of the game and I thought I should reapply.
(He/Him)
Peak Scale
Johann Gyger
(He/Him)
Peak Scale
- Location: Bern, Switzerland
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Cilium, Flux, Helm, in-toto, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Prometheus, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Strimzi
Johann is a passionate software engineer living in Switzerland. He has over 20 years of industry experience working as a developer, architect, trainer, and consultant in various domains and for different customers. Johann is enthusiastic about the cloud-native movement and organizes the Swiss Cloud Native day (https://cloudnativeday.ch) and the Cloud Native Bern Meetup (http://www.cloudnativebern.ch).
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Bringing engineers together at meetups and conferences is a fulfilling and inspirational task. I love to connect with this thriving community on a local and international level. And I would like to raise awareness of environmental sustainability.
(He/Him)
Seiso
Jon Zeolla
(He/Him)
Seiso
- Location: Pittsburgh, PA, United States
- Project Experience: Curiefense, Falco, Fluentd, Helm, in-toto, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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!
(He/Him)
Jose Flores
(He/Him)
- Location: El Salvador
- Project Experience: Kubernetes
Jose, a seasoned Senior Site Reliability Engineer and DevOps professional, boasts over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, spanning Software Development, Testing, and Operations. He’s successfully overseen complex production infrastructures on AWS for large-scale projects across multiple accounts, streamlining software delivery through the implementation of CICD pipelines. Proficient in a wide range of tools, including Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Docker, JFrog Artifactory, Terraform, Microservices, and AWS, Jose is certified in Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and AWS. His adaptability to emerging technologies and dedication to sharing knowledge have made him a Co-organizer for a Cloud Native Community in El Salvador since 2021, an AWS Community Builder since 2023, and the inaugural Cloud Native Ambassador representing El Salvador. Meetup Organizer Cloud Native San Salvador https://community.cncf.io/san-salvador/ Cloud Native Latam https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-latin-america/ KCD Organizer KCD El Salvador 2023 https://community.cncf.io/kcd-el-salvador/ Speaker KCD Guatemala 2023 KCD Colombia 2023 La Hora de Kubernetes
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador ignites my passion for bridging the divide between cloud-native innovations and the broader community. I am wholeheartedly dedicated to not only advocating for CNCF technologies and projects but also making sure that the benefits of cloud-native solutions are universally understood and accessible. My aspiration is to cultivate a more inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are valued, knowledge is shared generously, and the full potential of open source is realized. Through organizing meetups, conducting workshops, and engaging directly with the community, I aim to amplify the transformative impact of the cloud-native ecosystem and strengthen the core principles of open collaboration in El Salvador and across LATAM.
(He/Him)
Josh Gavant
(He/Him)
- Location: Chicago, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, Carvel, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, Dapr, Devfile, Dex, Distribution, Envoy, etcd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Konveyor, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, KubeVirt, KUDO, Kyverno, Open Cluster Management, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, ORAS, Porter, Prometheus, Rook, sealer, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Strimzi, Thanos, zot
Josh is passionate about enabling project builders and end users to succeed with cloud computing. He’s a solution architect for Red Hat and leader of CNCF’s TAG App Delivery and WG Platforms. He also leads the CNCF Chicago community group and other Chicago-area groups. Check out Josh’s blog at https://blog.joshgav.com/!
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to continue enabling beginners and experts alike to make the most of cloud computing! As an ambassador I’ll be even more empowered to educate and support Chicago-area developers in our local communities. I’m looking forward to sharing knowledge myself, but most of all I’m looking forward to enabling people in my communities to share their knowledge with each other!
(She/Her)
Veeam
Julia Furst Morgado
(She/Her)
Veeam
- Location: New York, United States
- Languages: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
Juliano Costa
(He/Him)
Dynatrace
- Location: Linz, Austria
- Languages: English, Portuguese
- Project Experience: Envoy, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry
Juliano is a passionate Software Engineer at Dynatrace Austria with extensive experience in cloud-related technologies. He is specialized in OpenTelemetry and is always working with Kubernetes, Helm, Containers, Jenkins, and other related tools. As one of the maintainers of the CNCF project OpenTelemetry Demo, Juliano has helped to create a distributed system that demonstrates the implementation of OpenTelemetry in a near real-world environment. With a strong belief in the power of community, Juliano co-founded the Cloud Native Computing Linz meetup. He actively participates in the tech community and is always willing to share his knowledge and insights with others. When not working, Juliano likes to spend his time with the family traveling around Austria and sightseeing new places.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I strongly believe in the power of the community and how it can help everyone grow, not just professionally, but as a whole. I’m extremely excited about being able to help growing the CNCF community and raising it awareness wherever I go. I love learning and sharing what I learn. The atmosphere and environment of openness created by CNCF is something that I take with me in every interaction I have. I’m super excited and thankful in becoming a CNCF Ambassador.
(He/Him)
O11y
Julien Pivotto
(He/Him)
O11y
- Location: Ath, Belgium
- Project Experience: containerd, CoreDNS, Cortex, gRPC, Jaeger, Kubernetes, NATS, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
R. H. Sapat College of Engineering
Kaiwalya Koparkar
(He/Him)
R. H. Sapat College of Engineering
- Location: Nashik, India
- Project Experience: Helm, k3s, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her)
Fermyon
Karen Chu
(She/Her)
Fermyon
- Location: Brooklyn, NY, United States
- Languages: English, Mandarin
- Project Experience: Helm, Kubernetes
Karen Chu is the Head of Community at Fermyon Technologies. Having participated in the cloud native community since 2015, she is a CNCF Ambassador, Helm community manager/maintainer, emeritus Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee member, meet-up organizer, and conference organizer. She has also worked on The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes book series. When she’s not connecting dots in the community, you can find her pursuing photography, cooking, and sipping on chai lattes.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Having help build this community since 2015, I’m fascinated by how far the ecosystem has come and how much further it can go. I’m extremely excited to see CNCF participate in new spaces and so with my continued work as a CNCF Ambassador, I look forward to helping bridge the gap between the cloud native and Webassembly communities.
(She/Her)
Kaslin Fields
(She/Her)
- Location: Seattle, WA, United States
- Project Experience: Kubernetes
Kaslin Fields is a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, CNCF Ambassador, and a contributor to Open Source Kubernetes. She is passionate about making Cloud Native technology exciting and fun to learn for everyone from seasoned pros to total newcomers. In addition to her work supporting the development of cloud native technologies as a contributor, she also aims to spread the word about this awesome field by producing talks, videos, blogs, documentation, comics, and more.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The Cloud Native ecosystem is active and growing, which can make it difficult for community members building awesome things to get the support they need. As an ambassador, I am passionate about providing support to folks building their own Cloud Native communities, technologies, and more.
(He/Him)
Lunar
Kasper Borg Nissen
(He/Him)
Lunar
- Location: Aarhus, Denmark
- Project Experience: Backstage, containerd, Crossplane, etcd, Fluentd, Flux, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenGitOps, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI)
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.
(He/Him)
Kemila De Silva
(He/Him)
- Location: Sri Lanka
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Thanos, wasmCloud
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.
(He/Him)
Huawei
Kevin (Zefeng) Wang
(He/Him)
Huawei
- Location: Hangzhou, China
- Project Experience: Karmada, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, Volcano
Kubernetes emeritus Maintainer, Founder and Maintainer of KubeEdge, Volcano, Karmada projects, Lead of Cloud Native Open Source Team at Huawei. Passionate about Open Source. Organizer of KCD China, CloudNativeDays China, Cloud Native + Open Source Virtual Summit China 2020.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been a long standing contributor to CNCF community since its beginning, contributed to Kubernetes upstream for years and now spend 100% of my work and focus on wider open source cloud native community development. I’m excited to continue my role as an ambassador this year to grow the overall CNCF community.
(He/Him)
Apple
Kohei Ota
(He/Him)
Apple
- Location: Japan
- Languages: English, Japanese
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, Contour, CRI-O, Envoy, etcd, external-secrets, Falco, Fluentd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Jaeger, KEDA, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Lima, Longhorn, OpenTelemetry, Pixie, Prometheus, Telepresence, Tinkerbell
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!
(She/Her)
Amesto Fortytwo
Kristina Devochko
(She/Her)
Amesto Fortytwo
- Location: Oslo, Norway
- Languages: English, Norwegian, Russian, Ukrainian
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), Dapr, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Kepler, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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 🙂
(He/Him)
Civo
Kunal Kushwaha
(He/Him)
Civo
- Location: London, UK
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, ContainerSSH, CoreDNS, Cortex, Crossplane, Dapr, DevSpace, Envoy, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Linkerd, Litmus, Meshery, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenEBS, OpenFunction, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Rook, SPIFFE, TensorFlow, Thanos, Vitess
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.
(He/Him)
LAB3
Lachlan White
(He/Him)
LAB3
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Dapr, Fluid, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Virtual Kubelet
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
Layer5
Lee Calcote
Layer5
- Project Experience: Envoy, Istio, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Meshery, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Service Mesh Performance
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
(He/Him)
Leon Nunes
(He/Him)
- Location: Mumbai, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, Envoy, Helm, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, OpenTelemetry, zot
I’m a technical support engineer, currently I mostly have varied interests ranging from Hardware to K8s and VM’s Blogs I’ve written are at https://dev.to/mediocreDevops
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: This is a quite new thing to me so I’m taking it all in, hoping I can get some guidance on how this whole thing works, but I’m excited to be a part of this and give back to the community
(He/Him)
Liquid Reply
Leonard Pahlke
(He/Him)
Liquid Reply
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, CoreDNS, Crossplane, Dapr, Envoy, gRPC, Helm, Kubernetes, Lima, NATS, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her)
Lin Sun
(She/Her)
- Location: Cary, NC, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Envoy, Helm, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Prometheus, SPIRE
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.
(She/Her)
Lisa-Marie Namphy
(She/Her)
- Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Istio, Kubernetes
Lisa is a developer advocate and community architect, and most recently was Head of Developer Relations at Cockroach Labs for 3 years. Lisa is also a CNCF Ambassador and SF Bay Cloud Native Platforms User Group organizer (with nearly 7000 members). Lisa is an advocate and frequent speaker for open source technology and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives, a writer, an avid sports fan, and loves wine and dogs. Follow Lisa on Twitter @SWDevAngel and LinkedIn @lnamphy.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It has been a great pleasure to be a CNCF Ambassador for the past several years and I am thrilled to continue the journey. I love working with this particular group of colleagues to evangelize open source and cloud native technology, to mentor new community members, to give a platform and a voice and to encourage participation in ALL areas of the cloud native ecosystem. And to have the support of the CNCF to extend the reach of cloud native technology to “the last mile” has been an extremely rewarding experience that I am grateful and excited to continue! 🙂 Looking so much forward to working with all of you in the coming years! 🙂
(He/Him)
Lucas Käldström
(He/Him)
- Location: Helsinki, Finland
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, etcd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, OpenGitOps, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, The Update Framework (TUF)
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.
(He/Him)
AWS
Lukonde Mwila
(He/Him)
AWS
- Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
- Project Experience: Argo, Envoy, external-secrets, Flux, Helm, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Lukonde is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. He has years of experience in application development, solution architecture, cloud engineering, and DevOps workflows. He is a life-long learner and is passionate about open-source and developer communities. Nowadays, Lukonde spends the majority of his time contributing to the cloud-native ecosystem. He specializes in Kubernetes, service meshes, and GitOps (ArgoCD and Flux). YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/LukondeMwila
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because it’s an opportunity to contribute to help provide enable for those who are part of the cloud native community, as well as those wanting to join. In addition to that, I’m excited to be a part of a group of individuals who are passionate about the development and adoption of cloud-native technologies. I’m also very keen to help expand the cloud-native footprint in Africa.
(He/Him)
Marcus Noble
(He/Him)
- Location: Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, CoreDNS, etcd, external-secrets, Flux, Harbor, Helm, k3s, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Prometheus, zot
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.
(He/Him)
Red Hat
Mario Loriedo
(He/Him)
Red Hat
- Location: Paris, France
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, CRI-O, Devfile, Dex, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, KUDO, Operator Framework
Mario is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He works on container-based developer tools. He co-maintains the CNCF Devfile project and leads the Eclipse Che project. He has been a speaker at conferences such as KubeCon, LinuxCon, JavaOne and FOSDEM.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be part of the CNCF ambassador program because that will help share my knowledge and my experience as a developer using and developing Kubernetes with others. I am also looking forward to meet with other ambassadors.
(He/Him)
Cisco
Márk Sági-Kazár
(He/Him)
Cisco
- Location: Budapest, Hungary
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, containerd, Curiefense, Dex, Distribution, Emissary-ingress, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Prometheus, zot
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.
(He/Him)
Marko Mudrinić
(He/Him)
- Location: Belgrade, Serbia
- Project Experience: Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
KGPCo
Mars Toktonaliev
(He/Him)
KGPCo
- Location: Dallas, TX, United States
- Project Experience: Container Network Interface (CNI), etcd, Helm, k3s, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Humanitec
Mathieu Benoit
(He/Him)
Humanitec
- Location: Québec, Canada
- Project Experience: gRPC, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS
I’m passionate about Cloud Native Computing technologies driven by Cloud, Security, Kubernetes and Platform Engineering. I’m one of the co-organizers of the CNCF&K8s Meetup in Quebec city (Canada). You will find some of my learnings in my personal blog: https://mathieu-benoit.github.io/ and in my Medium space: https://medium.com/@mabenoit.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a Cloud Native Ambassador will allow me to be closer to the CNCF community, and be connected to more mentors to grow my knowledge and as an individual too. It will also allow me to find more tips to promote content related to CNCF projects, and hopefully I will be able to help and inspire others to be more involved in this community.
(He/Him)
Snyk
Matt Jarvis
(He/Him)
Snyk
- Location: Kendal, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: etcd, Harbor, Helm, ko, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KUDO, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, TensorFlow
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.
(He/Him)
American Red Cross
Matthew Cascio
(He/Him)
American Red Cross
- Location: Washington, DC, United States
- Project Experience: Kubernetes, Pixie, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Mauricio Salatino
(He/Him)
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, CloudEvents, Crossplane, Dapr, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVela, OpenFeature, OpenFunction, Operator Framework
I am an Open Source Software Engineer at @Diagrid, contributing to and driving initiatives for the Dapr OSS project. I also serve as a Steering Committee member for the Knative Project, and I am Co-Leading the Knative Functions initiative. I’ve been writing on my blog, salaboy.com for over 15 years and I just published a book titled Platform Engineering on Kubernetes for Manning. I previously worked at VMware and Red Hat, building tools to help developers be more productive.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been working on Cloud Native and CNCF communities for over seven years now, and I’ve been constantly trying to give back and connect people who share the same interests around open source projects. Being an ambassador allows me to expand my network to keep connecting, mentoring, and guiding community members to grow.
(He/Him)
Liquid Reply
Max Körbächer
(He/Him)
Liquid Reply
- Location: Munich, Germany
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Cloud Custodian, Confidential Containers, Container Network Interface (CNI), Crossplane, Dapr, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Helm, Keptn, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Linkerd, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), wasmCloud, WasmEdge Runtime
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.
(He/Him)
Michael Levan
(He/Him)
- Location: Mount Arlington, NJ, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Flux, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Linkerd, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, rkt, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Thanos, Tinkerbell, Virtual Kubelet
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.
(He/Him)
Aviatrix
Mitch Connors
(He/Him)
Aviatrix
- Location: Redmond, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Crossplane, Envoy, Flux, Istio, Jaeger, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Linkerd, NATS, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Service Mesh Performance
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.
(She/Her)
LocalStack
Nancy Chauhan
(She/Her)
LocalStack
- Location: Bangalore, India
- Project Experience: Envoy, etcd, Helm, Kubernetes, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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
(He/Him)
Nao Nishijima
(He/Him)
- Location: Fujisawa, Japan
- Project Experience: Cilium, Falco, Helm, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Cloudyuga Technologies
Neependra Khare
(He/Him)
Cloudyuga Technologies
- Location: Bengaluur, India
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Rook
Neependra is the Founder and Principal Consultant at CloudYuga. He provides training in Cloud Native Technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus and others. He authored the first Kubernetes introduction course for the CNCF on Edx. Currently he runs the Kubernetes & Cloud Native Online meetup and one of the organiser of KCD Bengaluru. He writes blogs and hands-on lab at https://cloudyuga.guru .
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador to do more events in Bengaluru and India in general. Be an ambassador would give me opportunities to collaborate with folks across to globe to bring the best content out for community.
(He/Him)
Desotech
Nicola Marco Decandia
(He/Him)
Desotech
- Location: Altamura, Italy
- Project Experience: Antrea, Carvel, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Contour, CoreDNS, Dex, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Longhorn, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenEBS, OpenELB, rkt, Rook, Vitess
I am a seasoned cloud-native professional with over 20 years of experience in the industry, specializing in Kubernetes, containerization, and DevOps practices. As the founder and organizer of the Bari and Matera CNCF Cloud-Native Meetup, I have fostered a strong local community committed to sharing knowledge and best practices. My technical expertise spans across multiple CNCF projects, including Prometheus, Envoy, and Helm. I regularly share my insights and experiences on my blog at www.tanzu.eu, where I explore emerging trends and innovative solutions in the cloud-native ecosystem. Passionate about continuous learning and collaboration, I am excited to contribute to the community as a CNCF Ambassador.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to be an Ambassador because it allows me to actively contribute to the growth and development of the cloud-native ecosystem, which I am truly passionate about. This role provides a unique platform to engage with a diverse and talented community, enabling the exchange of knowledge and ideas that drive innovation. Furthermore, being an Ambassador presents the opportunity to mentor and inspire others while learning from the collective experiences of fellow professionals. It is an honor to serve as a bridge between the CNCF and the broader community, fostering collaboration and mutual support.
(He/Him)
Oracle
Noah Abrahams
(He/Him)
Oracle
- Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Cloud Custodian, Fluentd, Helm, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
SUSE Rancherlabs
Nuno Do Carmo
(He/Him)
SUSE Rancherlabs
- Location: Montreux, Switzerland
- Project Experience: k3s, Kubernetes, Kubewarden, Lima, Meshery
Known as the Corsair and a massive Windows fan in the Cloud Native community, he set his mission to help running the amazing Cloud Native projects on WSL2 and create “technologically inclusive” blogs at https://wsl.dev. He’s also a Tech Writer for SUSE where he contributes to the man OpenSource projects, such as Kubewarden, Epinio, Elemental, Rancher Desktop. His principal traits are that he has 4 cats at home (read: a lot of patience) and provides Swiss chocolate during events (read: community oriented)
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The most important point and motivation is the community! To be able to meet persons from different backgrounds and still share a same passion for Cloud Native ecosystem. And as a “rare” Windows fan in Cloud Native, one of my personal goals is to bring more docs/blogs/talks in running projects on WSL2 and make it even more inclusive for the million of Windows users around the world.
(He/Him)
Clouddley
Obinna Odirionye
(He/Him)
Clouddley
- Location: Lagos, Nigeria
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, Helm, Istio, Knative, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
WireMock Inc / CDF / Jenkins
Oleg Nenashev
(He/Him)
WireMock Inc / CDF / Jenkins
- Location: Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- Languages: English, French, Russian
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, Cilium, CloudEvents, Crossplane, Falco, Fluentd, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, Keptn, Knative, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenFeature, OpenFunction, OpenGitOps, Operator Framework, Prometheus
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/
(He/Him)
Olivier Vernin
(He/Him)
- Location: Belgium
- Project Experience: Artifact Hub, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Helm, Kubernetes, Kubewarden, OpenGitOps, ORAS, zot
Engineering Manager at SUSE, working on Kubernetes’s related projects such as Kubewarden, Epinio, Rancher Fleet. Builder of Updatecli, and Former Infrastructure officer of the Jenkins project. Olivier has some experience in building OSS tooling around infrastructure, automation, and growing communities.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: OSS projects have been a game changer in today’s IT world. Not only, it allow us to read and understand today’s application source code but ultimately it allows us to learn and share knowledge across our industry. The CNCF had a tremendous impact on breaking boundaries and fostering communities to work together and I am super excited to bring my little contribution to this movement.
(He/Him)
VMware
Orlin Vasilev
(He/Him)
VMware
- Location: Sofia, Bulgaria
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, Carvel, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Contour, Crossplane, Dragonfly, Envoy, etcd, Harbor, Helm, Knative, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Split Software
Pablo Fredrikson
(He/Him)
Split Software
- Location: Mendoza, Argentina
- Languages: English, Spanish
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Dragonfly, etcd, Fluentd, Helm, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Telepresence, Thanos
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.
(She/Her)
Chronosphere
Paige Cruz
(She/Her)
Chronosphere
- Location: Portland, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing
Paige Cruz is passionate about cultivating sustainable on-call practices and believes that open source instrumentation has a bright future. She isn’t afraid to admit that distributed traces are her favorite 😛 and will talk to anyone about adopting OpenTelemetry. After retiring from SRE she brought her zest for bringing people their aha moment with observability to Chronosphere where she works as a Senior Developer Advocate. Read her blog posts over on https://chronosphere.io/learn/category/blog/ or her personal blog at https://www.paigerduty.com/. Off-the-clock you can find her scouring fiber apprenticing at a local sustainable yarn mill or watching trash TV.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Excited to be an ambassador to demystify observability concepts and practices for all levels of technologists. Looking to grow the OpenTelemetry community from end-users to contributors and maintainers while sparking collaboration across company boundaries.
(He/Him)
Red Hat
Paolo Patierno
(He/Him)
Red Hat
- Location: Napoli, Italy
- Project Experience: Jaeger, KEDA, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Strimzi
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.
(He/Him)
Grafana Labs
Paul Balogh
(He/Him)
Grafana Labs
- Location: St. Louis, United States
- Project Experience: Kubernetes, Linkerd, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
AWS
Phil Estes
(He/Him)
AWS
- Location: Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
- Project Experience: Buildpacks, Confidential Containers, containerd, CRI-O, Distribution, gRPC, Istio, k3s, Keylime, ko, Kubernetes, Lima, Notary, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, The Update Framework (TUF), Virtual Kubelet, zot
Phil is a Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on core container technologies that power AWS container compute offerings. Phil is currently an active contributor and maintainer for containerd, a graduated CNCF project, and participates in the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the member of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Phil enjoys helping others understand and implement container and cloud native concepts and speaks worldwide at industry conferences and meetups on behalf of AWS and his open source roles.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador for the express purpose of helping others understand the world of containers and, specifically, the core container runtime technology and standards that enable and power that world. Having been involved in the CNCF since nearly its beginning, I know that it can be an overwhelming place for newcomers at it has grown, and as an ambassador, I’m happy to play a part in helping people understand and navigate the projects and work of the CNCF.
(He/Him)
Microsoft
Phil Huang
(He/Him)
Microsoft
- Location: Taipei, Taiwan
- Languages: English, Mandarin
- Project Experience: Harbor, Kubernetes
I am an active member of the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/cloudnative.tw) at Taiwan with extensive experience and skills. I am passionate about sharing my knowledge and experiences, irregularly organizing Meetup events (https://community.cncf.io/kcd-taiwan/) to provide professional expertise on Kubernetes and CNCF technologies. In addition, I also run my own blog, where I share practical information and experiences related to Kubernetes and container technologies. Please feel free to visit my blog at https://blog.pichuang.com.tw
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because I believe in the program’s value and the chance to connect with like-minded individuals. It’s rewarding to represent the program’s values and contribute to the community’s awareness and adoption of the technology.
Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/pichuang
(He/Him)
Harness
Prithvi Raj
(He/Him)
Harness
- Location: Bhubaneswar, India
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
Prithvi Raj has been leading the community efforts for LitmusChaos, the CNCF incubating project based on Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering, and has helped scale a community of 1500+ folks from scratch. He is currently working at Harness as a Technical Community Manager. He has worked on organizing global events, conferences, and meetups such as Chaos Carnival, Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru & Chennai, CNCF Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetups, and more to help grow various communities in the DevOps ecosystem.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to represent the chaos engineering community as a CNCF ambassador and to also work with fellow ambassadors in helping curate more resources, events, and opportunities for the broader community. As an ambassador, I hope to take forward the cloud-native values amongst various folks keen on joining the ecosystem. I also look forward to learning a lot on this journey from my fellow ambassadors.
(He/Him)
Giant Swarm
Puja Abbassi
(He/Him)
Giant Swarm
- Location: Cologne, Germany
- Project Experience: Cilium, Dex, Helm, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Puja Abbassi is the Vice President of Product at Giant Swarm, building a managed cloud native developer platform based on Kubernetes. In Kubernetes he focuses on extending Kubernetes with custom resources and controllers. With many years of Kubernetes experience and having been in the beta batch of CKAs, he enjoys solving problems and helping people in the community, mainly within SIG Contributor Experience. He used to also be a contributor to the CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks. I blog at https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/author/puja-abbassi and sometimes on the CNCF or other community blogs.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF ambassador, I’m passionate about bringing cloud native technologies to more developers and their organisations around the globe. Especially, as the community is growing both from a project perspective as well as on the end user side, I’m excited to bring the two closer together and see how we can enable end user organisations to build cloud native platforms using CNCF projects.
Sessionize Profile: https://sessionize.com/puja
(He/Him)
sevensphere
Rachid Zarouali
(He/Him)
sevensphere
- Location: Lyon, France
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, ContainerSSH, CoreDNS, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, Curiefense, DevSpace, etcd, external-secrets, Falco, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Kured, Kyverno, metal3-io, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenCost, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, ORAS, Parsec, Pixie, Prometheus, Telepresence, Thanos, zot
Freelance cloud architect, OSS addict, huge fan of k8s, cilium, argocd and friends. I speak regularly about cloud tech, security and OSS projects I use or implement for my clients. I run several meetups in my city Docker, CNCF Lyon, DevSecCon France, co-organize conferences (KCDFRANCE) and involved regularly as conference MC and member of CFP committee , more importantly I’m a happy husband and dad
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m freaking excited to join the ambassador community.To meet new friends, help growing communities, sharing the skills I’ve learned and give back to the CNCF community. Being an ambassador will allow me to what i love the most, mentoring, i can’t wait to jump in !
(He/Him)
kubernetes@.com
Ramesh Kumar
(He/Him)
kubernetes@.com
- Location: Sacramento, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, Crossplane, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Lima, Linkerd, Network Service Mesh, Open Cluster Management, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Policy Containers, Open Service Mesh, OpenCost, OpenEBS, OpenELB, OpenGitOps, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Service Mesh Performance, Virtual Kubelet, Vitess
I’m Ramesh Kumar, a passionate advocate of cloud-native technologies and a dedicated mentor. I am the founder and organizer of the CNCF/Kubernetes Sacramento Meetup and CNCF/Kubernetes Penang Meetup, where I empower and support over 500 students in obtaining Kubernetes certifications, helping them enhance their lives and careers. My specialties lie in mentoring, teaching, and training, and I take pride in my ability to inspire and guide others in their learning journey. Through my meetups and expertise in CNCF technologies, I strive to build a more inclusive and innovative tech community, one act of kindness at a time. I also maintain a blog where I share my knowledge and insights with the broader tech community.
(He/Him)
Isovalent
Raphaël Pinson
(He/Him)
Isovalent
- Location: Lausanne, Switzerland
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), Falco, Flux, Helm, k3s, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTracing, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Reda Benzair
(He/Him)
- Location: Paris, France
- Project Experience: Kubernetes
passionate about Cloud Native Computing Foundation technology since 2016. We create the First “Cloud native cloud France », a non-profit organization, in order to increase the CNCF audience and grow up interest in the native cloud philosophy. contributor and organizer of th the Meetup /Cloud-Native-Computing-Paris/ and the Kubernetes Community Days France.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Continue to increase the French community and increase their visibility recognition.
(She/Her)
Regina Voloshin
(She/Her)
- Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
- Project Experience: Argo, Crossplane, Helm, Knative, Kubernetes, Open Cluster Management, Operator Framework, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Rey Lejano
(He/Him)
- Location: San Francisco, CA, United States
- Project Experience: Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, k3s, Kubernetes, Kubewarden, Longhorn, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Amesto Fortytwo
Roberth Strand
(He/Him)
Amesto Fortytwo
- Location: Oslo, Norway
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), CoreDNS, Dapr, Envoy, external-secrets, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Kubernetes, Kured, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenGitOps, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), Thanos
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
(He/Him)
Nordcloud, an IBM company
Robin Smorenburg
(He/Him)
Nordcloud, an IBM company
- Location: Almere, Netherlands
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, Crossplane, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Flux, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, KEDA, Knative, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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!
(He/Him)
SHANGHAI DAOCLOUD NETWORK TECHNOLOGY CO. LTD. (DAOCLOUD)
Roby Chen
(He/Him)
SHANGHAI DAOCLOUD NETWORK TECHNOLOGY CO. LTD. (DAOCLOUD)
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: Cilium, Clusterpedia, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Merbridge
I am honored to continue serving in this role. Over the past few years, My company DaoCloud has made continuous contributions to the open-source community. Our contributions to Kubernetes, a core cloud-native project, have ranked among the top three globally over the past year. In 2022, we will also take on a contributing seat on Istio’s steering committee. We have independently open-sourced nine projects, including Clusterpedia, Merbridge and Piraeus which have successfully entered CNCF Sandbox incubation. DaoCloud continues to contribute significantly towards cloud-native technology and improve CNCF’s technical ecosystem.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Firstly, I hope that cloud-native technology will remain highly connected to China, and that the integration of the technology world will not be affected by geography, politics, international conflicts and other factors. Secondly, I hope that cloud-native technology can break through the barriers between technology and users, and that more end-user voices can be fed back to CNCF. Thirdly, I hope to promote the building of cloud-native technology talent and further improve the cloud-native education system, so that CNCF will become a sustainable organization.
(He/Him)
Rodolfo Martinez Vega
(He/Him)
- Location: Guadalajara, Mexico
- Project Experience: gRPC, Helm, Kubernetes, Meshery, NATS
I’m a software developer and a Linux lover. I’m a co-organizer of Cloud Native Guadalajara and Golang Guadalajara meetups in Mexico. I love contributing to Open Source since it has helped me a lot in my career and meet amazing people.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ll reach out and help more people to start contributing to the Open Source. I’ll encourage and motivate them to learn technologies to impact the world. Also, I’m excited to meet other ambassadors to learn from them and also help to grow our local communities.
(He/Him)
Rohit Ghumare
(He/Him)
- Location: Mumbai, India
- Project Experience: Backstage, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CRI-O, Envoy, Istio, k3s, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Ronit Banerjee
(He/Him)
- Location: Kolkata, India
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, etcd, gRPC, Helm, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Linkerd, Longhorn, Meshery, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(They/Them)
Honeycomb.io
Rynn Mancuso
(They/Them)
Honeycomb.io
- Location: Oakland, CA, United States
- Project Experience: containerd, Crossplane, Istio, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE
Rynn Mancuso is the developer community manager at Honeycomb, one of the maintainers of OpenTelemetry’s End User SIG, and the creator of the OpenTelemetry in Practice meetup & the OTel Unplugged unconference. Before joining Honeycomb, they led developer communities at New Relic, Tidelift, Mozilla and Wikimedia. They also contribute to the Organization for Ethical Source.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador because I’m getting to connect with lots of great people across all of the CNCF projects to make the cloud native ecosystem better. In my ambassadorship year, my goals are to take the great speakers we are cultivating in the observability community and help place them in as many general cloud native meetups as possible to spread the word about cloud native observability, to start a streaming series where we work with different CNCF projects to instrument them, and to get the word out about the end user work we’ve been doing within OpenTelemetry so other projects can better serve end users.
(He/Him)
Sagar Utekar
(He/Him)
- Location: Pune, India
- Project Experience: Argo, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), Cilium, containerd, Falco, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Kuma, Meshery, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI), TensorFlow, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
Sai Linn Thu
(He/Him)
- Location: Singapore
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), Envoy, gRPC, Istio, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, SPIFFE, SPIRE
Sai is currently working as Senior Solutions Architecture Specialist, APJ at HashiCorp and is based out of Singapore. Sai started his career in Networking and had 17 years of experience in private/public cloud infrastructure solutions for highly regulated security-conscious industries such as Banking, Financial Services Industries, Aviation, ISPs and Public Sector organizations across APJ Region. Previously He was part of the Field Engineering team at solo.io, Professional Services Consultant (APJ) at chef.io. He focuses on modernizing infrastructure automation and microservices application networking from Edge to Service Mesh at scale, where the tech stacks are built on HashiCorp Vault, Consul, Boundary, Terraform, Chef, Istio, Envoy Proxy, eBPF, Cilium, GraphQL built for Kubernetes, VMs & Cloud.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Singapore and ASEAN Region need more active and organized meetups around cloud native community. The activities are behind compare to US, EMEA and ANZ Region. As an ambassador, I will continue to create more awareness and advocate CNCF projects in Singapore and ASEAN Region. I am also participating for the KubeDay Singapore as one of the event chairs, and continue to contribute. I’m very proud of being CNCF Ambassador and representing CNCF in Singapore and APAC Region.
(He/Him/They/Them)
Rafay Systems
Saim Safdar
(He/Him/They/Them)
Rafay Systems
- Location: Rawalpindi, Pakistan
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, Crossplane, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Helm, Istio, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kubescape, Kyverno, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Open Service Mesh, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, Paralus
Hello, my name is Saim Safdar, working as a Developer Relations Manager at Rafay Systems, host of the cloud-native podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@cloudnativefm), co-founder of Cloud Native Islamabad (https://community.cncf.io/islamabad/), Organizer of KCD Pakistan (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/03/10/from-community-group-to-event-a-kcd-pakistan-experience/). Maintainer of the cncf Sandbox project, Paralus (https://www.paralus.io/).
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love sharing my Open Source jourey with others, currently there’s a desparate need of mentorship within the community, as cloud native eco-system constantly equipped with new tooling, students, tech pro, difficult to find and map existing knowledge to work with OS and communities, I’m hoping my time as an Ambassador, I’ll get on-board and shortened the loop for code to contribution to outreaching new OS tooling to the world.
(He/Him)
Civo
Saiyam Pathak
(He/Him)
Civo
- Location: India
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, containerd, etcd, Falco, Helm, Istio, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, ko, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVirt, Kubewarden, Kyverno, Longhorn, OpenCost, OpenGitOps, Operator Framework, Skooner, Thanos, wasmCloud, WasmEdge Runtime, zot
Saiyam is working as Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo with a focus on defining the Civo cloud platform for simplifying Kubernetes and making it accessible for developers. Previously at Walmart Labs, Oracle, and HP, Saiyam has worked on many facets of k8s including machine learning platform, scaling, multi-cloud, managed k8s services, and k8s documentation. He’s worked on implementing Kubernetes solutions in different organizations. When not coding, Saiyam works on contributing to the community by writing blogs and organizing local meetups for Kubernetes and CNCF. He is also a CNCF ambassador, runs a YouTube channel and Kubesimplify community that aims to simplify cloud native and can be reached on Twitter @saiyampathak
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Simplifying cloud native for everyone
(She/Her)
SANCHITA MISHRA
(She/Her)
- Location: Bhubaneshwar, India
- Project Experience: etcd, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Kyverno, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
Red Hat
Sascha Grunert
(He/Him)
Red Hat
- Location: Leipzig, Germany
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Confidential Containers, CRI-O, gRPC, Kubeflow, Kubernetes
Sascha works on many different container related open-source projects like Kubernetes and various container runtimes. He joined the CNCF community back in 2018, having gained container experience before. Sascha’s passions include contributing to open source, as well as giving talks and evangelizing Kubernetes-related technologies.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to act as CNCF ambassador because mentoring and onboarding new people into the community is one of my passions! The CNCF ambassador program provides me a bigger context to connect with new and existing community members. It also makes it easier for me to boost the visibility of open source projects while evangelizing best practices, code of conduct and openness.
(She/Her)
Savitha Raghunathan
(She/Her)
- Location: Boston, United States
- Project Experience: containerd, CoreDNS, CRI-O, etcd, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Konveyor, Kubernetes, Operator Framework, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Kubermatic
Sebastian Scheele
(He/Him)
Kubermatic
- Location: Hamburg, Germany
- Project Experience: Cilium, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Tinkerbell
Sebastian Scheele is CEO and co-founder of Kubermatic, a start-up with +90 employees that is one of the committers to Kubernetes, focused on developing open core software solutions for automating Kubernetes operations, at scale. Sebastian, a developer himself, has his finger on the pulse of where the Kubernetes landscape is going and is contributing many of his team’s resources to upstream K8s development. As one of the early pioneers in the cloud native ecosystem , he has helped hundreds of enterprises embrace Kubernetes to solve cutting edge challenges in both cloud and edge computing.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF Ambassador, I am proud to have the opportunity to make a positive impact on the cloud-native community. I want to contribute to the development of open-source projects, educate and inspire others through talks and content creation, and help promote the adoption of cloud-native technology.
(He/Him)
Vinci Energies France
Sébastien DAVOULT
(He/Him)
Vinci Energies France
- Location: Lorient, France
- Project Experience: Argo, containerd, etcd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Knative, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus
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.
(She/Her)
Seema Saharan
(She/Her)
- Location: Bangalore, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Artifact Hub, etcd, Fluentd, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes
Seema Saharan is working as an SRE in Autodesk. I am an IT enthusiast, who is passionate about all the latest technologies from a research perspective. I love to help, mentor people, and share my knowledge. I do that through my blogs, videos, and meetups.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF ambassador is an exciting opportunity for me, who is passionate about cloud-native technologies, which enables me to promote these cutting-edge technologies, engage with a vibrant community, share my knowledge, network with industry professionals, and contribute to open-source projects. It offers opportunities for personal and professional growth, as well as the chance to influence the direction of the CNCF community and its projects.
(He/Him)
Senthil Raja Chermapandian
(He/Him)
- Location: Chennai, India
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, cert-manager, containerd, Contour, Envoy, Fluentd, gRPC, Helm, Istio, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
Seokho Son
(He/Him)
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
- Location: Daejeon, South Korea
- Project Experience: Crossplane, etcd, Helm, Istio, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
San Carlos of Guatemala University
Sergio Méndez
(He/Him)
San Carlos of Guatemala University
- Location: Guatemala
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Contour, Flux, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Jaeger, k3s, KEDA, Keptn, Knative, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Longhorn, NATS, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Strimzi
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.
(He/Him)
BRAC University
Shahriyar Al Mustakim Mitul
(He/Him)
BRAC University
- Location: Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Project Experience: Argo, CloudEvents, Helm, Istio, k3s, Kubernetes, Litmus, Prometheus, TensorFlow
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.
(He/Him)
Intel
Shane Wang
(He/Him)
Intel
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: Confidential Containers, containerd, Envoy, Istio, KubeEdge, Kubernetes
Dr. Shane Wang is an engineering director of Cloud Native China at Software and Advanced Technology Group in Intel. He and his team have been working on open source cloud software for many years since 2012, including Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, containerd, serverless, edge, Ceph and OpenStack etc. He is an individual director of OIF foundation, alliance committee chair of SODA foundation, a TOC member of Mulan open source community, and one of the standing committee members of Open Source Development Committee in China Computer Federation (CCF), and one of Tencent Cloud Valuable Professionals. He organizes and runs cloud native meetups with China partners primarily in Shanghai and Beijing, focusing on Kubernetes, Istio and Envoy technologies.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Because with that I can organize regular meetups better in China with the local community including Tetrate, DaoCloud, Alauda, Alibaba and Tencent etc. bridging between CNCF and many China-based open source communities, I can drive more engineering contributions to CNCF projects and engagements with China customers for adoption. I’m also able to contribute more technical materials to CNCF Webinars and Blogs, etc. and pursue more presentation opportunities at CNCF conferences e.g. KubeCon China.
(He/Him)
Datree
Shimon Tolts
(He/Him)
Datree
- Location: Tel-Aviv, Israel
- Languages: English, Hebrew
- Project Experience: Argo, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), Helm, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Shimon co-organizes the CNCF chapter in Tel Aviv, In addition, he is also the co-organizer of KCD Israel. He also creates tutorial videos about cloud-native technology and Kubernetes. In addition, Shimon maintains the Datree open-source project (https://github.com/datreeio/datree 6000+ Stars), a cloud-native solution to prevent Kubernetes misconfigurations by blocking resources that do not meet your policy.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be a CNCF ambassador as I believe in the CNCF philosophy of being a vendor-agnostic and open-source foundation. I wanted to become a CNCF Ambassador to continue performing community activities involving the CNCF and open-source projects and host meetups and events like the KCD.
(He/Him)
Shu Muto
(He/Him)
- Location: Japan
- Project Experience: containerd, CoreDNS, etcd, Helm, Kubernetes
Shu Muto is a Principal Software Engineer at NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd., a company within the NEC group. He serves as one of the maintainers for Kubernetes Dashboard and holds the position of chair for SIG UI. Since 2019, Shu has been organizing Kubernetes Upstream Training sessions in Japan, dedicated to training both contributors and mentors, and to promote the culture of open source. – [SIG UI Chair](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-ui) – [Kubernetes Upstream Training in Japan](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/contributor-playground/tree/master/japan/) – [Kubernetes Upstream Training in remote](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/contributor-playground/tree/master/remote/) – [How to Hold Upstream Training in Your Country and Get New Contributors! – Shu Muto, Kenichi Oomichi, Akihito Inoh](https://sched.co/Vusd) – [How Kubernetes upstream training has been held in Japan for four years, getting over the COVID-19 situation – Shu Muto, Xie Ziyi](https://sched.co/1CXMI) – [CNCF Cloud Native Community Japan](https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-community-japan/)
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I hope to spread the culture of development within the open source community more than ever before and promote collaboration among developers around the world. Many developers and users, including myself, may not be fluent in English, so I would like to improve and translate guidelines to encourage their participation and enjoyment in the community.
(He/Him)
Simon Forster
(He/Him)
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, containerd, CRI-O, external-secrets, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Stéphane Este-Gracias
(He/Him)
- Location: Luxembourg
- Project Experience: Antrea, Artifact Hub, Backstage, Buildpacks, Carvel, cert-manager, Cilium, containerd, Contour, Distribution, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Kubernetes, Kured, Lima, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Teller, zot
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.
(He/Him)
Ascend Healthcare and solution
syed asad raza
(He/Him)
Ascend Healthcare and solution
- Location: Lahore, Pakistan
- Project Experience: Argo, Brigade, CloudEvents, etcd, Helm, k3s, KEDA, Kubernetes, Kuma, Kyverno, TensorFlow
Hi Team, I am DevOps and MultiCloud Engineer and happy to become a CNCF member to add some input to this journey.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It provides a platform to connect with other professionals in the industry, share knowledge and expertise, and contribute to the growth of the community. As an ambassador, one can learn about the latest developments and trends in the cloud-native ecosystem and play a role in shaping the future of the industry.
(He/Him)
Kasten by Veeam
Sylvain Huguet
(He/Him)
Kasten by Veeam
- Location: Paris, France
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CRI-O, Dex, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, Falco, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, K8up, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Longhorn, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenEBS, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Operator Framework, Prometheus, Rook
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!
(He/Him)
Taylor Thomas
(He/Him)
- Location: Salt Lake City, United States
- Project Experience: Helm, Krator, Krustlet, Kubernetes, NATS, wasmCloud
Taylor Thomas is an Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the creators of Krustlet and Bindle. He is an org maintainer for the wasmCloud project and a participant in the CNCF Wasm Working Group. His work at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft spanned various containers and Kubernetes platforms as well as WebAssembly platforms.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am extremely excited to help the Cloud Native community grow, especially with Wasm. I have been involved in the CNCF for years and am happy to be giving back to a community that got me deeply involved in open source.
(He/Him)
Thomas Labarussias
(He/Him)
- Location: Bordeaux, France
- Project Experience: Argo, Cilium, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Falco, Fluentd, Helm, k3s, KEDA, ko, Kubernetes, Kyverno, NATS, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
WhizUs
Thomas Schuetz
(He/Him)
WhizUs
- Location: St. Pölten, Austria
- Project Experience: Argo, Carvel, cert-manager, Crossplane, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, Keptn, Kubernetes, KubeVela, OpenFeature, OpenGitOps, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Thomas Vitale
(He/Him)
- Location: Aarhus, Denmark
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, Carvel, cert-manager, CloudEvents, Contour, Crossplane, DevSpace, external-secrets, Fluentd, Flux, Helm, in-toto, Knative, Kubernetes, Kyverno, OpenGitOps, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, The Update Framework (TUF)
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.
(He/Him)
Flexport
Tiexin Guo
(He/Him)
Flexport
- Location: Chengdu, China
- Languages: Chinese, English
- Project Experience: Argo, Backstage, cert-manager, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), DevStream, external-secrets, Falco, Flux, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Linkerd, NATS, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Prometheus
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.
(He/Him)
Preferred Networks
Toru Komatsu
(He/Him)
Preferred Networks
- Location: Japan
- Project Experience: Cilium, containerd, CRI-O, Helm, Jaeger, k3s, Kubernetes, Lima, OpenTelemetry
Toru contributes to OSS as an individual contributor. He is the author and lead developer of youki, an OCI Runtime in Rust, and I am also a maintainer of the OCI Runtime Specification. Additionally, he serves as a reviewer for runwasi and is involved in developing a world that utilizes containers and Wasm. Lately, he has developed an interest in Kubernetes schedulers. Furthermore, he has given presentations at KubeDay Japan and has spoken at various community events in Japan.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The area of container runtime is the unsung hero of the Cloud Native space, where the intricacies of the technology and new features often don’t get the spotlight they deserve. As a developer in this field, I want to help more people become aware of the exciting features it has to offer. I aim to encourage them to take the leap into this fascinating domain! I am also looking forward to assisting the Japanese Cloud Native community in becoming more vibrant on an international level.
(He/Him)
Victor Morales
(He/Him)
- Location: San Jose, United States
- Project Experience: cert-manager, Cilium, CNI-Genie, Container Network Interface (CNI), CRI-O, Envoy, Helm, Istio, Knative, ko, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Tinkerbell, WasmEdge Runtime
Victor is a passionate Sr. Staff Software Engineer in the Samsung Open Source Group with nearly 18 years of experience in building solutions that are easy to use, scale and adapt. He is a regular speaker at technical conferences in LATAM Open Source communities. Co-chair of the CNF Working Group in the CNCF, and Co-founder of the OpenStackGDL, Cloud-Native El Salvador and Guadalajara communities. Active contributor to CNCF, LFN and Open Infrastructure projects and fervent supporter of the DevOps culture.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Besides the benefits that open source brings to the companies, fundamentally is people who fuel the innovation. Thanks to CNCF Ambassador program, I can be able to amplify the Latin America voice sharing their success local histories and distinct challenges faced by the region.
(He/Him)
Viktor Farcic
(He/Him)
- Location: Barcelona, Spain
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), Cilium, Crossplane, Dapr, DevSpace, Falco, Flux, Harbor, Helm, KEDA, Knative, KubeArmor, Kubernetes, Kubescape, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Kyverno, OpenFunction, OpenGitOps, Pixie, Prometheus, SchemaHero, Teller
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.
(He/Him)
Timescale
Vineeth Pothulapati
(He/Him)
Timescale
- Location: Hyderabad, India
- Project Experience: Cortex, gRPC, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Virtual Kubelet
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.
(She/Her)
VMware
Whitney Lee
(She/Her)
VMware
- Location: Austin, Texas, United States
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, Carvel, CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), cert-manager, Crossplane, DevSpace, Emissary-ingress, Flux, Harbor, Helm, k3s, Keptn, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, SchemaHero, Telepresence
Whitney is a lovable goofball who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. This past fall, Whitney co-presented a silly yet informative keynote about platform building at Kubecon NA 2022 (https://youtu.be/eJG7uIU9NpM). You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV (https://via.vmw.com/Enlightning), and she also co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! – a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’-style journey through the CNCF landscape. And not only does Whitney rock at tech – she literally has toured playing in the band Mutual Benefit on keyboards and vocals.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: When I was new in the cloud native space, it was very intimidating that in every room that I entered the men *vastly* outnumber the women. It has taken time and intentional effort to learn how to proudly take up space, join conversations, and understand that my opinion as a relative beginner has a lot of value. I’m excited to be a CNCF Ambassador in the hopes that the title will give me connections, credibility, and reach to find and elevate underrepresented voices on the streaming shows that I host. The more visibility we have, the more we can help to create a welcoming environment for everyone. I’m also excited to make SO MANY NEW FRIENDS!
(He/Him)
William Rizzo
(He/Him)
- Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Project Experience: Akri, Argo, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, CoreDNS, Cortex, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Flux, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Jaeger, k3s, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Kubewarden, Kyverno, Litmus, Longhorn, metal3-io, NATS, OpenCost, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, TensorFlow, Thanos
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
(He/Him)
Microsoft
Xander Grzywinski
(He/Him)
Microsoft
- Location: Seattle, United States
- Project Experience: Helm, Kubernetes, Notary, Open Policy Agent (OPA), ORAS, Prometheus
Xander is an open source product manager at Microsoft. He is also a member of the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee, and was release lead for Kubernetes 1.27. When not in front of a computer screen, you’d likely find him at a pottery wheel.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I’m excited to help continue to make the cloud native community as kind and inclusive as it can be. I’ve always felt very welcome in this community, and I hope to be able to extend that same feeling to others.
(He/Him)
Flomesh(DaLian YiHeng KeJi YouXian GongSi)
Xiaohui Zhang
(He/Him)
Flomesh(DaLian YiHeng KeJi YouXian GongSi)
- Location: Guangzhou, China
- Project Experience: Argo, Buildpacks, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), Dapr, Harbor, Helm, Istio, k3s, Karmada, Knative, Kubernetes, Open Service Mesh, OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Service Mesh Interface (SMI)
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.
(He/Him)
Xunzhuo Liu
(He/Him)
- Location: Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China
- Project Experience: Aeraki Mesh, BFE, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, Container Network Interface (CNI), containerd, Contour, CoreDNS, Dapr, Emissary-ingress, Envoy, etcd, gRPC, Harbor, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, KubeVela, Linkerd, Merbridge, Meshery, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos
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.
(He/Him)
Amazon Web Service
Yiming Peng
(He/Him)
Amazon Web Service
- Location: Seattle, United States
- Project Experience: containerd, Envoy, gRPC, Knative, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry
Serverless addict / Software creator / Open-Source enthusiast / Community host. Creator and maintainer of community CloudNative-Serverless-Meetup (Follow: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-native-serverless-meetup/) and newsletter: https://www.learnsomesoftwareinfrastructurethismonth.com/ (Subscribe it if you like, and don’t forget check the confirmation email in inbox, it is double opt-in). Photographer, Music lover, have a taylor made in walnut, and I love Icewine. Find me on Twitter: @pymhq ; More in http://yimingpeng.com/
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to be joining the CNCF Ambassador program. As someone who is deeply passionate about building and promoting infrastructure, particularly in the realm of Cloud Native technologies, I feel grateful for the opportunity to deepen my connections with the community and share my knowledge and experience with open-source users around the globe. By being part of this program, I hope to make a broader impact and bring even more value to CNCF. Additionally, I am eager to learn more about the needs of users and help them understand how they can effectively use cloud native and container technology to solve their problems.
K8SUG.com
Yongkang He
K8SUG.com
- Location: Singapore
- Project Experience: Falco, Kubernetes, Kyverno
Yongkang is a Principal Containers Specialist based in Singapore supporting Asia Pacific. He shifted the focus on Cloud Native technologies few years ago. He is now fully certified on Kubernetes (KCNA, CKA, CKAD and CKS). He embraces Open Source and dedicated to help the community. He is organizing the largest Kubernetes Meetup in Singapore. http://k8sug.com He created the automation scripts which can be found from GitHub to allow people to spin up a new Kubernetes Cluster in minutes. http://g.k8sug.com In addition, he created his YouTube channel to focus on Kubernetes Day 1 and Day 2 Data Management and Security. http://y.k8sug.com
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m super excited to be part of the Cloud Native Ambassadors program. I am pretty sure I will enjoy being able to work with other peers globally to learn and share.
(He/Him)
Yoshiyuki Tabata
(He/Him)
- Location: Yokohama, Japan
- Project Experience: Envoy, Istio, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Open Policy Agent (OPA), OpenTracing, Strimzi
Yoshiyuki Tabata is a Senior OSS Consultant at Hitachi, Ltd, responsible for API Security, especially Authentication/Authorization. As an authentication and authorization expert, he mainly consults on authentication and authorization infrastructure and API infrastructure, for example designing and building API/SSO systems in the financial, public, social, and industrial fields. He’s also a contributor to API-related OSSs such as Keycloak and 3scale and develops features based on feedback from actual projects he consulted. He’s also a conference speaker of API-related events and an author of some books and web articles about Identity and Access Management.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I usually consult with our customers on authentication and authorization infrastructure and API infrastructure (I have experience building systems for finance and government using Keycloak and Kubernetes), and it seems that the adoption rate of the CNCF family in general systems is still low in Japan. Also, in systems that adopt the CNCF family, there are many systems with weak security due to placing too much emphasis on developer experience and agility. Therefore, as a CNCF ambassador, I would like to use the knowledge I have cultivated through many projects (not only the knowledge as a security consultant but also the knowledge as a Keycloak contributor and a conference speaker) to spread the word about a better and safer CNCF ecosystem.
(He/Him)
Prusa Research a.s. / Freelance Cloud Consultant
Zdeněk Váňa
(He/Him)
Prusa Research a.s. / Freelance Cloud Consultant
- Location: Prague, Czech Republic
- Languages: Czech, English
- Project Experience: Argo, cert-manager, Crossplane, Dex, etcd, external-secrets, Helm, Jaeger, KEDA, Knative, Kubernetes, Kyverno, OpenCost, OpenGitOps, Thanos
My agenda is taking care of team serving cloud platform and design it’s architecture. I’m a cloud enthusiast who missed events and community in my area. So I have relaunched Cloud Native Prague meetups and I co-organize Kubernetes Community Days Czech & Slovak.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m honored to be an ambassador as I can help with spreading knowledge about fantastic cloud native technologies and connecting people with the same interest. It can help them to solve their issues instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again.
(He/Him)
zou nengren
(He/Him)
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Project Experience: containerd, CoreDNS, gRPC, Istio, Kubernetes, OpenKruise
I have spent the last seven years honing my expertise in the cloud-native ecosystem, with a particular focus on maintaining various communities like Kubernetes, CoreDNS, KNative, and Containerd. While my experience in these areas has been invaluable, my current focus lies in the Cloud OS System. As a seasoned professional, I regularly share my knowledge and insights on cloud-native technologies through my blog, which can be found at ustack.io. Whether you are a novice or a seasoned pro, my blog posts offer practical tips and in-depth analysis that can help you stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving field. So whether you are looking to dive deeper into Kubernetes or explore the latest trends in cloud-native ecosystem, be sure to check out my blog.
Why I am excited to be an ambassador: being an CNCF ambassador provides me with the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise in cloud-native technologies with a wider audience, and allows me to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and trends in cloud-native technologies