Seventh annual awards recognize outstanding community members and organizations for advocacy, contributions, and leadership in the cloud native ecosystem
CHICAGO, Ill. – November 8, 2023 – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the winners of the seventh annual CNCF Community Awards. The Community Awards recognize CNCF community members who are going above and beyond to advance cloud native technology. CNCF now hosts 173 projects with more than 219,000 contributors and over 800 members.
“The cloud native ecosystem can’t function without the amazing open source community that collaborates together to drive technology forward,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “While we can’t recognize every member doing amazing work, it’s an honor to be able to award these individuals and organizations that have gone above and beyond in the past year to make the community better.”
This year’s awards are presented in the following categories: Top Committer, Chop Wood Carry Water, Top Documentarian, and, new this year, the TAGGIE and Tiny but Mighty. The winners were nominated by the CNCF community and voted on by CNCF staff and the TOC.
Top Committer: This award recognizes excellence in technical contributions to CNCF and its hosted projects. The CNCF Top Committer has made key commits to projects and, more importantly, contributes in a way that benefits the project as a whole. CNCF is pleased to present the award to:
- Akihiro Suda (@_AkihiroSuda_) – Akihiro is a Software Engineer and maintainer of several projects, including containerd and Lima.
Top Documentarian: This award recognizes excellence in documentation contributions to CNCF and its projects. Excellent technical documentation is one of the best ways projects can lower the barrier to contribution. We are happy to present the award to:
- Divya Mohan (@Divya_Mohan02) – Divya is a tech evangelist, a Kubernetes maintainer, a CNCF Ambassador, and an organizer for Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Mumbai. She is also a joint documentation co-chair for the Kubernetes and LitmusChaos projects.
Chop Wood Carry Water: This award is given to community members helping behind the scenes, dedicating countless hours to open source projects, hosting and building community meetups, and often completing thankless tasks for the benefit of the community. CNCF is pleased to present this award to:
- Kaslin Fields (@kaslinfields) – Kaslin is a developer advocate, co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast, CNCF Ambassador, and contributor to the Kubernetes project. She also chairs SIG Contributor Experience and creates educational cartoons about containers, Kubernetes, and other topics.
- Faseela K (@FaseelaDilshan) – Faseela is a cloud native software developer, member of the Istio Steering Committee, and program chair for the IstioDay co-located events, as well as an open source evangelist and speaker.
- Arnaud Meukam (@ameukam) – Arnaud is a software engineer and a maintainer of the Kubernetes project. He has been involved in the project for over 5 years, is the SIG Chair for the Kubernetes Infrastructure Group and is a release manager.
- Lin Sun (@linsun_unc) – Lin is a director of open source, a member of the Istio TOC and Steering Committee, a CNCF Ambassador, a frequent speaker, and an author at O’Reilly.
- Rajas Kakodkar (@RajasKakodkar) – Rajas is a senior software engineer, tech lead for CNCF’s TAG Runtime, and a contributor to the Kubernetes project.
The TAGGIE: This award is presented to the person who has done the most to advance CNCF’s Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs). TAGs scale contributions by the CNCF technical and user community, while retaining integrity and increasing quality in support of CNCF’s mission of making cloud native ubiquitous. We are happy to present the award to:
- Catherine Paganini (@CathPaga) – Catherine is a co-chair for both the TAG Contributor Strategy and CNCF Business Value Subcommittees, as well as co-creator and maintainer for the Cloud Native Glossary. Catherine has also helped spearhead Deaf and Hard of Hearing WG.
Small but Mighty: This award recognizes the company or organization in the community with the largest impact. CNCF is made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations, each providing valuable contributions, but this award is presented to an organization punching above its weight. CNCF is pleased to present this award to:
- Weaveworks – Weaveworks enables teams to build, automate, secure and manage cloud native infrastructure and applications quickly, reliably, and at scale. As one of the first CNCF members, they have been instrumental in the GitOps movement, along with being one of the CNCF’s top contributors for several open source projects, including the Graduated CNCF project – Flux, Flagger, Cortex, OpenGitOps, and many more.
Previous Community Awards winners include Aeva Black, Alex Chircop, Anaïs Urlichs, Ben Elder, Bridget Kromhout, Carlos Panato, Carolyn Van Slyck, Emily Fox, Erin Boyd, Josh Berkus, Matt Fisher, Nikhita Raghunath, Richard Hartmann, Tasha Drew, and Tim Bannister.
Additional Resources
About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.
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