Honorees span end users, maintainers, mentors, and long-time contributors, reflecting the strength and diversity of the cloud native ecosystem

Key Highlights

ATLANTA, KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA—November 12, 2025— The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the winners of the CNCF Community Awards at the annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.

Over the years, the CNCF Community Awards aim to recognize and highlight key contributors across all CNCF projects and Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs). These awards celebrate those committed to shaping the cloud native ecosystem, acknowledging outstanding contributions in areas such as technical leadership, documentation, mentorship, and end-user implementation. Winners were recognized and received their trophies during the event’s award ceremony.

“This year’s award recipients reflect what it really takes to go above and beyond in sustaining the cloud native community,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “From mentoring new contributors to maintaining docs to hosting community events, the contributors are doing the hard work that helps our projects grow, stay reliable, and move faster together.”

Lifetime Achievement Award

The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to longtime contributors who have significantly influenced cloud native technologies and demonstrated sustained commitment to the ecosystem. This award honors individuals whose efforts over the past decade have been instrumental in shaping and supporting the Kubernetes and CNCF communities.

This event’s recipients are:

“The Lifetime Achievement Award honors contributors whose dedication serves as the bedrock of the cloud native movement, guaranteeing its strength and continuity for generations to come,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. “The work done by leaders like Dawn Chen and Kevin Wang not only benefits today’s projects, but actively ensures the enduring health of the entire cloud native community.”

Top End User Award

The Top End User Award celebrates organizations that have significantly advanced cloud native development both internally and across the wider CNCF community. These recipients, drawn from innovative organizations whose primary goal is to harness cloud native architectures to solve real-world problems, are vital to the ecosystem’s momentum. Honored contributions often include publishing internal practices, sharing reference architectures, and dedicating substantial staff resources to contributing across multiple CNCF projects.

This event’s winner is:

Top Committer Award

The Top Committer Award, also known as the Top Cloud Native Committer Award, recognizes an individual for their incredible technical skills and notable technical achievements across one or multiple CNCF projects as a maintainer. This accolade highlights sustained, collaborative development that benefits CNCF-hosted projects as a whole. The award honors those who demonstrate deep technical impact whose work reflects dedicated contributions essential for the ongoing vitality of the cloud native ecosystem.

This event’s winner is:

Chop Wood Carry Water Award

The Chop Wood Carry Water Award recognizes the essential, behind-the-scenes community work crucial to maintaining the health and longevity of the cloud native ecosystem. This accolade honors contributors who spend countless hours completing often mundane but critical tasks, such as supporting documentation, organizing meetups, and maintaining project infrastructure.

CNCF offers special recognition for Han Kang, one of the honorees, who recently passed away. A longtime contributor to Kubernetes SIG Node and kubelet, Han’s generosity and technical insight had a profound effect on the community. He is remembered not only for his work, but also for his spirit of mentorship and collaboration.

Additional winners are:

Outstanding Mentor Award

The Outstanding Mentor Award celebrates contributions to mentorship and community growth. For this inaugural award, CNCF recognizes Lee Calcote, founder of Layer5, for serving as a mentor over 60 times in the past five years through CNCF and Linux Foundation programs. His work across initiatives and the fact that he’s had several mentees go on to become CNCF project maintainers in their own right reflect his sustained commitment to supporting newcomers and building community capacity. Learn more about his mentorship history here.

Cloud Native Hero

The Cloud Native Hero Award recognizes individuals who champion the defense of open source technology by participating in the CNCF and Unified Patents Cloud Native Heroes Challenge. This award honors cloud native developers and technologists for submitting “prior art,” which is crucial in countering patent threats and helping to stop nuisance lawsuits launched by patent trolls who increasingly target cloud native open source due to its success. By engaging in this challenge, participants actively protect the ecosystem and have the opportunity to win cash prizes, swag, and conference tickets.

This event’s winners are:

TAGGIE

The TAGGIE award is a key recognition within the CNCF Community Awards, given to individuals who have done the most to advance the CNCF TAGs. This award celebrates those contributors whose efforts are instrumental in scaling contributions from the technical and user community while ensuring the integrity and quality necessary to make cloud native ubiquitous. 

This event’s winners are:

End User Case Study Contest

The End User Case Study Contest highlights real-world adoption of CNCF projects. This year’s winner, OpenAI, which will present its case study on Wednesday, November 12, was recognized for its work using Fluent Bit to significantly reduce CPU usage while shipping logs at petabyte scale across Kubernetes environments.

OpenAI needed to ship unprecedented volumes of logs but faced CPU throttling issues that made scaling its DaemonSets infeasible. After examining how Fluent Bit uses system calls, the team found some problems with inotify and suggested other methods: more frequent checking of file status and reducing the frequency. The result was reduced CPU usage and improved reliability—work is now being prepared as an upstream patch for the broader Fluent Bit and OSS community.

Lorem Ipsum 

The Lorem Ipsum award, also known as the Top Documentarian award, recognizes excellence in documentation contributions made to the CNCF and its hosted projects. Recipients are honored for their efforts in enhancing both the usability and inclusion across CNCF projects.

CNCF encourages the community to participate in ongoing initiatives that strengthen the cloud native ecosystem. Technologists are invited to join the CNCF End User Community to collaborate with peers and contribute to the influential group of organizations harnessing cloud native architectures to solve real-world problems. The community is also encouraged to check the CNCF calendar for details on local events and register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.

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 nearly 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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Kaitlin Thornhill

The Linux Foundation

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