Ambassadors

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.

Angel Ramirez is a Kubernetes Certified Administrator (CKA) and curator of the Kubernetes CKA exam, with expertise in cloud computing, infrastructure, cloud and software architecture, DevOps, security, team building, leadership, and community building. With over a decade of experience in the industry, Angel is a skilled practitioner and evangelist of cloud native technologies. Angel has founded the Hispanic Foundation of Cloud Native, which aims to empower the Spanish-speaking community to adopt cloud native technologies, and currently runs two Kubernetes community chapters with over 1500 members, making him a valuable asset and true Kubernetes Ambassador. https://www.youtube.com/@fhcn https://community.cncf.io/kcd-colombia/ https://community.cncf.io/medellin/ https://community.cncf.io/south-florida/ https://www.meetup.com/lahoradekubernetes/ https://www.meetup.com/kubernetes-and-cloud-native-south-florida/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVCT1t69BF4&list=PLKR8WO9E9BlM_22CmbvsiBlWsXQK9l9R5

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As the Kubernetes Ambassador, I am particularly excited to help the LATAM and Hispanic communities learn and adopt Cloud Native and Kubernetes. Cloud native technologies have the power to transform businesses and individuals alike, and I am passionate about sharing this potential with as many people as possible. By empowering the community to embrace these technologies, we can create a more equitable and prosperous future for everyone. I am honored to have this opportunity to make a difference in the lives of so many people.

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 🙂

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.

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.

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

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

Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase & Co, Head of Cloud Architecture & Engineering for Asset & Wealth Management. Working with Kubernetes since 2014. Founded multiple meetups and currently involved in the North Dallas CNCF Meetup.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: My passion is growing the community by finding, creating and delivering meaningful content. I want members to feel skilled to do their work, and aware of the evolution and innovation in the space.

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.

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!

Julia Furst Morgado is a Global Technologist 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.

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.

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.

Lisa is a developer advocate and community architect, and Head of Developer Relations at Cockroach Labs (the company behind CockroachDB). Lisa is also a CNCF Ambassador and SF Bay Cloud Native Containers 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! 🙂

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scott is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist and Developer Advocate. He co-founded the Basekamp art and research group in 1998 and the massively collaborative Plausible Artworlds international network. In technology he enjoys helping develop open source software that anyone can use, most recently projects in the cloud native landscape including co-maintaining Helm, Flux, and OpenGitOps. He helps organize groups such as NYC Kubernetes meetup and CNCF GitOps Working Group under TAG App Delivery. In daily decisions large or small, he tries to help make the world a better place for everyone.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I deeply enjoy helping members of the wider open source community, specifically the CNCF and LF project communities. I try to lift others up whenever possible: through co-presenting talks, replying in Slack, amplifying the work of others, welcoming new people to meetings, helping ensure meetings run smoothly, helping with CNCF Working Group and project governance, and generally being an ally. I’m particularly interested in continuing to encourage cross-project collaboration and alignment between people in CNCF TAGs, WGs and projects. I’m also very dedicated to continuing to help new people step up contributor ladders (and encouraging the creation of those ladders when not present), specifically getting involved in things like project pull request reviews, design discussions, and communication processes around projects and WGs.

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!

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.

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.