Ambassadors

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.

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.

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.

Jon Zeolla is the founder of Zenable, where they are revolutionizing corporate governance by integrating cloud-native security and compliance with artificial intelligence. Previously he co-founded Seiso where he received the 2021 Start-Up Innovator of the Year Award and currently serves as strategic advisor, guiding key business decisions and company growth.

He is also a CNCF Ambassador, SANS Instructor for SEC540: Cloud Security and DevSecOps Automation, and an active member of CNCF TAG Security.

A Masters of Computer Science Student at Banaras Hindu University. Passionate about Cybersecurity, DevOps and Cloud Computing. An active open-source contributor, contributed towards several open-source projects. Previously, contributed to in-toto as a GSoC contributor.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a part of cloud native community, gaining new skills and qualities. Gathering more knowledge from other community members. Motivating and guiding my community members towards cloud native.

An avid coder, a systems engineer working on solutions involving security and performance optimizations of cloud-native technologies. He runs a Kubernetes Cloud Native Security Bangalore Meetup and has been working closely with IETF Standards working groups. Taken several projects from conception to market and is an active maintainer for CNCF Sandbox project, “KubeArmor” and the lead author for IoT simulation framework “Whitefield”. He co founded Accuknox where they are enabling runtime, zero-trust security by leveraging Linux-LSM/eBPF based security for k8s and containerized/cloud-native workloads.​

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Connecting to community and engaging at events, meeting new people, talking about cloud native technologies is something that I cherish. It is always great to be an ambassador of the community whose motto and modus operandi is something that I believe in. One specific goal that I would like to achieve is to establish a security focussed community locally by understanding activities that were undertaken at CNCF wide initiatives.

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.

Vyom is a final-year computer science student who has been working with open source throughout his degree program. He has been awarded the Google OSPB Award for contributing to Kubernetes. He has been a contributor to Kubernetes, Kyverno and KubeArmor. He co-organizes the CNCF Chandigarh Chapter.