The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is thrilled to congratulate the 2025 Term 3 (September – November) CNCF LFX Mentorship Program mentees who have successfully completed the program! This term saw a fantastic cohort of mentees working across 27 different Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects, including Cilium, KubeArmor, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, OpenCost, and many more.
Our mentors and mentees have worked tirelessly over the past three months to improve code, documentation, and community engagement. The LFX Mentorship program continues to be a vital pipeline for new contributors to the cloud native ecosystem, fostering the next generation of open source leaders.
Below, you’ll find highlights from some of our graduating mentees, followed by a full list of all the successful projects and participants from this term.
The next term of CNCF LFX Mentorship is accepting applications now! If you’re interested in participating, check out our list of projects to apply to.
Applications are open til February 10, 2026.
Mentee Profile Highlights
KubeEdge
During this LFX Mentorship with KubeEdge, I systematically restored the lifelong learning semantic segmentation benchmark in Ianvs—a distributed synergy AI benchmarking toolkit for edge computing. The project involved resolving 17 critical issues across multiple framework layers, including compatibility fixes for PyTorch 2.0+, CPU-only operation enablement, multi-round knowledge persistence, and path resolution for cross-environment deployment.
Mentee: Abhishek Kumar (read Abhishek’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Zimu Zheng, Shijing Hu
“My LFX Mentorship with CNCF and KubeEdge has been an incredibly enriching experience that transformed the way I understand open-source engineering. Over the course of the program, I had the opportunity to work on a challenging real-world problem, collaborate closely with experienced mentors, and contribute meaningfully to a production-grade project. The guidance, reviews, and continuous support from the community helped me grow not just technically—through debugging, restoring complex pipelines, and understanding large-scale system architecture—but also professionally, by learning open-source best practices, communication, and collaborative development. This mentorship has been one of the most impactful learning journeys of my career, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to contribute to CNCF’s vibrant and supportive ecosystem.”
OpenCost
During my LFX Fall 2025 mentorship with OpenCost, I designed and implemented a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server integration that enables AI agents to query Kubernetes cost allocation data through natural language. The implementation includes three primary tools integrated directly into the main OpenCost binary and enabled by default in v1.118+.
Mentee: Adesh Pal (read Adesh’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Alex Meijer and Matt Bolt
“The LFX Mentorship program exceeded my expectations in every way. Working with mentors Alex Meijer and Matt Bolt, I learned not just how to write code, but how to think about production systems—they challenged me on edge cases, pushed me beyond ‘just working’ to production-ready, and taught me that great open source is as much about maintainability and user experience as functionality. The structured yet flexible program gave me space to explore while providing clear milestones that kept me accountable. What surprised me most was how welcoming the OpenCost community was—attending biweekly meetings, I saw decisions being made collaboratively and felt my contributions genuinely mattered.”
WasmEdge
The project primarily involved adding support for stateful /responses endpoint to the llama-nexus project which at the time supported /chat/completions endpoint which is stateless. The further goal of the project was to add support for a code interpreter. This interpreter was run using a sandboxed environment via Docker-container.
Mentee: Ashish Dalal (read Ashish’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentor: Michael Yuan
“The experience with LFX mentorship was very smooth and nurturing. The mentors and maintainers were very supportive throughout the project and I could take time to test my own ideas and approaches to a feature. Suggestions given during PR review proved very helpful and at times insightful. Whenever I faced challenges during the mentorship, I was given steady support and help.”
Kmesh
Engaging with the open-source community and solving problems, especially those related to implementing parts of IPSec, has been an immensely rewarding and fulfilling experience. Throughout the project, my mentors guided me in driving the progress of the open-source initiative, patiently answering my questions and providing direction.
Mentee: Haobin Huang (read Haobin’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience).
Mentors: Zhonghu Xu, Zhencheng Li
“Overall, I had a very positive experience. The main challenge was that I found it quite difficult to get started and orient myself within the entire project at the very beginning. I feel incredibly fortunate to have participated in the LFX Mentorship project, as it has significantly enhanced both my knowledge and coding skills. Before joining the Kmesh project, I had no clear understanding of what a service mesh actually does. Through my involvement, I have gained a broad overview of the service mesh field and had the opportunity to learn about and get hands-on experience with cutting-edge developments.”
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Kubernetes
During my LFX Mentorship, I worked on improving the Kubernetes API reference documentation generator—an essential but fragile tool used at the end of every Kubernetes release cycle. The generator often failed silently or in undocumented ways, making the process dependent on a single expert with deep internal knowledge. My project focused on reducing this fragility by refactoring brittle parts of the codebase, adding clearer and more actionable error handling, and enhancing the tool’s documentation.
Mentee: Lavish Pal (read Lavish’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Kat Cosgrove, Rey Lejano, Xander Grzywinski, Nate Waddington
“The learning experience I had over the last 3 months will prove to be helpful throughout my career. Going through documentation, looking for references, testing things out etc are some skills that I was able to improve during this mentorship. The opportunity to contribute to a real world project as a student feels amazing. The support from my mentors Nate Waddington, Kat Cosgrove, Rey Lejano made the mentorship experience productive and fulfilling.”
KubeStellar
My LFX Mentorship with CNCF KubeStellar was a mission to make reliability mission-critical for our multi-cluster Kubernetes platform. I designed and built a robust, end-to-end Playwright testing framework from scratch, leveraging the Page Object Model (POM) architecture to validate every complex, distributed system workflow. This effort wasn’t just about covering code; it was about preventing failure, leading to the prevention of over 25 critical, production-bound bugs.
Mentee: Nupur Shivani (read Nupur’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Andy Anderson, Onkar Shelke, Shivam Kumar, Rishi Mondal
“My LFX Mentorship with CNCF KubeStellar was a transformative and unparalleled experience that launched my career from academic theory to impactful production engineering. It wasn’t just about coding; it was a rigorous journey in professionalizing my skill set, demanding hard-earned confidence in architecting complex solutions, mastering the CI/CD lifecycle, and preventing regressions in a live, distributed system. The mentorship structure—combining high-impact projects like the E2E testing framework with the unexpected opportunity to lead and mentor other contributors—provided growth that far exceeded any classroom.”
Cilium
During my LFX Mentorship with Cilium, I worked on improving the project’s overall discoverability and search performance by enhancing its SEO, AEO, and AIO. My contributions focused on refining metadata, improving structured data, reorganizing heading hierarchies, creating a dedicated FAQ page, adding TL;DR summaries, and ensuring machine-readable content across key documentation and website pages.
Mentee: Peace Sandy (read Peace’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentor: Bill Mulligan
“My LFX Mentorship experience was incredibly rewarding and transformative. The program allowed me to work closely with experienced maintainers, gain hands-on exposure to real open-source development, and strengthen both my technical and communication skills. The support from my mentor and the Cilium community made learning enjoyable, collaborative, and deeply empowering. This mentorship not only expanded my understanding of cloud-native technologies but also boosted my confidence to contribute meaningfully to open-source projects.”
Kubernetes (Kube State Metrics)
During my LFX Mentorship, I focused on fully automating the release process for kube-state-metrics (KSM), which previously required a lot of manual effort every few months. I built a set of GitHub workflows that streamline the entire pipeline end-to-end automating all commands needed to create the pre-release PR, generating pre-releases with GoReleaser, creating release notes, and handling the post-release steps as well.
Mentee: Rishab Kumar Jha (read Rishab’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Pranshu Srivastava, Manuel Rüger
“My overall LFX Mentorship experience was genuinely awesome. My mentors were incredibly supportive and always available to guide me whenever I got stuck, which made the entire journey smooth and enjoyable. I learned a lot especially around release engineering, CI/CD workflows, GitHub Actions, and the kind of real-world practices teams follow when cutting and managing releases. It was the kind of hands-on, industry-level exposure I was hoping for, and I honestly have no complaints, just a lot of gratitude for how much I learned and how welcoming the community was.”
KubeEdge
My project might be one of the most interesting and unique LFX projects this year. Unlike many contributions that focus mainly on adding code, improving CI/CD, or writing unit tests, this work was a complete research-driven project built around Edge AI and Deep Learning. The project explores Embodied Intelligence, which is undoubtedly one of the most trending and impactful areas of AI today, with applications across every major industry.
Mentee: Ronak Raj (read Ronak’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Zimu Zheng, Shijing Hu
“From a 16-year-old learning Python to a 19-year-old contributing to cutting-edge AI research — this journey has been incredible. The LFX Mentorship Program gave me far more than technical skills; it gave me confidence, mentorship, valuable connections, and a clear direction for my career. To my mentors, Dr. Zimu Zheng and Dr. Shijing Hu — thank you for believing in me, guiding me, and constantly pushing me to deliver my best work. Your feedback, patience, and support made all the difference.”
KubeArmor
During my LFX Mentorship with KubeArmor, I worked on enhancing the project’s observability by implementing Prometheus metrics for policy and alert monitoring. The main goal was to give users better visibility into how their security policies are performing in production. I added four key metrics that track policy counts, policy metadata, total alerts, and rule violations with detailed labels showing which policies are being triggered and what actions are being taken.
Mentee: Saurav Teli (read Saurav’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Rishabh Soni, Aryan Sharma, Ramakant Sharma, Barun Acharya
“My LFX Mentorship experience with KubeArmor was incredibly valuable for learning how real-world open source development works. The mentors were supportive and patient, especially when I hit infrastructure challenges during local testing that took days to troubleshoot. What I appreciated most was the guidance on writing clean, maintainable code – they pushed me to refactor my initial implementation of the rule violation metric from a simple 17-line approach to a more robust 41-line version with proper filtering logic…. The experience of contributing to a CNCF project gave me confidence in tackling complex codebases and showed me that even when things don’t work perfectly the first time, persistence and asking the right questions gets you there.”
Podman Container Tools
My LFX Mentorship project with Podman aimed to solve a specific UDP networking issue where Conntrack creates a stale record of a failed connection attempt, blocking the sender on that port until the entry times out. The goal was to implement conntrack entry clearing into Netavark, Podman’s network management tool.
Mentee: Shivang K Raghuvanshi (read Shivang’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Matthew Heon, Paul Holzinger
“Overall, it was a great experience. I learned a lot of things from it. Beyond the technical skills, I truly appreciated how welcoming and helpful the Podman team was. My mentors, Paul and Matt, were incredibly helpful and responsive. We had weekly meetings, and I really appreciate the time they dedicated to me. Honestly, they are some of the best mentors anyone could ask for; their support kept my motivation high throughout the program.”
OpenCost
During the LFX Fall 2025 mentorship with OpenCost, I worked on KubeModel—a next-generation data model designed to bring more accurate and reliable cost tracking to Kubernetes environments. The core problem I tackled was that Kubernetes is inherently dynamic: pods get recreated, names get reused, and resources constantly shift, which makes traditional name-based tracking unreliable.
Mentee: Sparsh Raj (read Sparsh’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience)
Mentors: Alex Meijer, Sean Holcomb, Niko Kovacevic
“My LFX Mentorship experience with OpenCost was genuinely rewarding. What I appreciated most was being involved in the design process from the ground up – rather than just implementing predefined tasks, I got to participate in architectural discussions and help shape how KubeModel would work. My mentors, Alex, Sean, and Niko, were incredibly supportive throughout. They gave me the space to explore ideas while providing guidance when I needed it, and they were always open to questions and feedback. It felt less like a typical mentorship where you’re handed a checklist and more like being part of a real engineering team working through a complex problem together.”
CloudNativePG
The CloudNativePG Chaos Testing project validates PostgreSQL cluster resilience on Kubernetes by combining Jepsen consistency testing (mathematical proofs that no data is lost or corrupted) with LitmusChaos fault injection (repeatedly killing the primary PostgreSQL pod to force automatic failovers).
Mentee: Yash Agarwal (read Yash’s personal blog post about mentorship experience)
Mentors: Gabriele Bartolini, Jonathan Gonzalez, Marco Nenciarini, Francesco Canovai
“It was a great learning experience. My mentors were very experienced and amazing in their work and I learnt and grew a lot in this process. I also got to contribute to another CNCF project Litmus Chaos because of its dependence on this project. The feedback which the mentors provided was spot on. The code reviews done by Jonathan (one of my mentors) was very deep dived. I also learnt more about good and standard coding practices and documentation methods. Overall it was an amazing experience.”