Ambassadors

I’m a Cloud Developer Advocate with Google. I co-lead the Cloud Native Compute Group of Casablanca, Morocco. I’m a co-host for the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and the Cloud Careers Podcast.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Learn from the community. Contribute to the Open Source and Cloud Native world and help inspire others to do the same

DevOps & Cloud Engineer, Public Speaker, Tech Mentor, Lead Organizer CNCG Jaipur, OpenSource & Community Contributor, AWS Community Builder, AWS Community Leader, 1 x (AWS, GCP, Azure), 6 x RedHat, CKA, KCNA certified.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It’s been more than three years, I am being part of CNCF programs actively contributing via blogs, and public speaking on different open source DevOps/Cloud technologies at virtual and in-person events, I want to expand my learning and contribution with a wide area of peoples and uplift them with like-minded folks I can grow at the same time can share & help with my ideas to build better community bonding & culture.

Ali is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he focuses on developing and contributing to open-source software. He has a strong track record of contributions to various projects, communities, and foundations, and he is currently an active contributor to the Knative project. In addition to his technical contributions, Ali is also deeply committed to mentoring and promoting contributor growth within the CNCF community. He plays an active role in the Google Summer of Code program at CNCF, where he serves as an admin. He is also a frequent speaker on topics such as starting to contribute to open-source software and the projects he is working on.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador is an exciting opportunity for me to expand my reach and impact within the community. As someone who is already involved in mentoring and contributor growth activities at CNCF, I’m eager to use the ambassador title to promote CNCF technologies, open-source software, and help interested individuals get started with contributing to CNCF projects. Additionally, being part of a network of other CNCF Ambassadors will allow me to collaborate and share ideas with like-minded individuals who are passionate about the same things. I’m excited to be part of this community and look forward to making a meaningful impact.

Ananda Dwi Rahmawati is a Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, specializing in system integration between cloud infrastructure, CI/CD workflows, and application modernization. She is a regular technical speaker who delivers presentations using real-world case studies at several local community meetups and conferences, such as Kubernetes and OpenInfra Days Indonesia, GNOME Asia Summit, LibreOffice Conference, and many more.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming an ambassador is such a huge dream. I love to open-source and cloud-native projects, willing do more contributions and spread the spirit of open-source enthusiasts to others.

I am a freelance cloud-native engineer and trainer based in Amsterdam. When I am not coding, I enjoy helping the community by organizing meetups, Kubernetes community days, and workshops on cloud technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Ambassadors are a point of reference in the cloud native community and help many initiatives come to life. I want to empower talented individuals to realize their ambitions and help the CNCF to reach a wider community through events, meetups, and mentoring. I want to make a difference by empowering others.

Seasoned software builder / technology leader based in Seattle (WA). Technical advisor. Public speaker and author. Specialized in large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing: AI + Data, containers & virtualization, serverless compute, open-source. Diverse experience encompassing both people management and technical leadership, including cross-company collaborations. Community Lead of Cloud Native Seattle. Member of LF AI & Data Generative AI Commons. Guest lecturer of University of Washington Foster School of Business. Photographer, Music lover, have a taylor made in walnut, and I love Icewine. Homepage: https://pengandy.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 fundamental technologies, particularly in the realm of Cloud Native solutions, 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 Linux Foundation and 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.

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.

Aurélie is a DevRel at OVHcloud. She is a GDE (Google Developer Expert) for Cloud technologies, Docker Captain, CNCF Ambassador & GitPod Hero. Conferences and meetups organizer since 2016. She is a technical writer, a book author & reviewer. She is also a sketchnoter and a speaker at international conferences. She created a new visual way for people to learn and understand Cloud technologies: “Understanding Kubernetes/Istio/Docker in a visual way” in sketchnotes, videos and visual technical books. Blog: https://dev.to/aurelievache/ Conferences: https://noti.st/aurelievache YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AurelieVache Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Aur%C3%A9lie-Vache/author/B09WHB5YR6 Website: http://scraly.com/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been a passionate and advocate of Cloud Native, especially CNCF technologies, for many years and I am very happy to be its ambassador. It’s an opportunity for me to share and spread knowledge, contribute to native cloud technologies and meet the community.

Carla has been managing events and communities since 2011. She started with experimental music festivals and eventually ended up in Tech, where she fell in love with its ecosystem. During her career she has produced and run many conferences (yes, also the virtual ones!), meetups, webinars and hackathons. Formerly at Container Solutions managing everything “WTF is Cloud Native” and “Software Circus”, she currently buzzes around Cilium and eBPF at Isovalent. She is also one of the organisers of KCD UK, a CNCF and OpenUK Ambassador, and the 2022 CNCF Marketing Committee Chair. Carla drinks way too much tea (mainly green), has an unhealthy obsession for Japan and a big passion for art, music, cinema, philosophy and fashion. Recent blogs: https://blog.container-solutions.com/why-your-event-needs-a-code-of-conduct-and-you-need-to-enforce-it https://blog.container-solutions.com/how-hard-is-it-to-deliver-a-virtual-conference https://blog.container-solutions.com/tech-events-in-the-time-of-covid-19-5-tips-to-survive

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: This is an invaluable opportunity to support the CNCF and the Cloud Native community. I’m incredibly excited to help new joiners and spread more awareness around all the initiatives they can embrace within the CNCF, the various KCDs and the Cloud ecosystem in general.

Carlos Santana is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS leading Container solutions in the Worldwide Application Modernization GTM team. He is experienced in distributed application architecture, emerging technologies, open source, serverless, gitops, devops. He is a contributor to CNCF projects such as Kubernetes and Knative. Find him on Twitter @csantanapr or his Kubernetes Bookclub https://santana.dev

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to work with the CNCF, and be able to help the CNCF to improve on how it works and get perceive by the community of contributors and consumer of cloud native tech. I’m excited to meet new folks and be able to collaborate on projects on enablement of projects such as Kubernetes.

David Peter Hirsch is a Program Manager at Dynatrace’s Open Source Program Office, where he oversees the company’s open source initiatives. He is responsible for driving compliance and security efforts around open source software within the company, as well as supporting the creation and contribution to new open source projects. David also supports projects in their early stages, helping drive adoption and community development for Keptn, OpenFeature, and OpenTelemetry, and works closely with the engineering teams to ensure their success. David is a member of the InnerSource Commons and TODO Group, and he fosters collaboration with foundations and participation in the community and conferences. He is an enthusiastic advocate for open source software and is particularly interested in the intersection of open source and artificial intelligence. Currently, he is working towards his MBA and a degree in Artificial Intelligence to further his knowledge and expertise in these areas. Through his work and studies, David is helping to promote the growth and development of open source software and its impact on the tech industry as a whole.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to become a CNCF ambassador because I believe in the power of this community to make a positive impact on the world. By supporting open source projects and encouraging adoption, I can help ensure that more people and organizations benefit from the values of open source software. In addition, I’m passionate about promoting open source to young students in Europe. By encouraging them to get involved, I can help create a new generation of open source enthusiasts who are equipped with the skills and knowledge to succeed in the tech industry. Overall, I’m excited to contribute my time and energy to this important cause and to help make a difference in the world of open source.

I started my career in a data center in Istanbul, Turkey. I have been interested in the CNCF world since 2018. Although my main areas are generally technical aspects, there were companies where I took part in community and product management. I am currently in the role of Co-Founder at Kubezy. Apart from the commercial side, we have been organizing events as Organizers at CNCG Istanbul since last year, together with my friends in Turkey. I am also a member of the KCD Türkiye team. I have a community role as Technology Evangelist at KubeSphere and KubeSphere Products.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am in love with community and all things community. I have met so many people since I first joined the CNCF community. It is a great pleasure to contribute to this community with people from all over the world who believe in the same goal. One goal and hundreds of people contributing to this goal. I think my biggest excitement in being an ambassador is making new friends and representing my community in the best way possible. Also, ambassador swags are great 🙂

Harry is a DevOps Evangelist and CTO @ Melio AI. He specialises in helping organisations navigate the cloud native landscape and adopt cloud native technologies. Harry runs the Cloud Native Computing Johannesburg Meetup which is part of the CNCF community groups in South Africa. https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-computing-johannesburg/ https://community.cncf.io/johannesburg/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Harry is excited to be an ambassador as he is able to bring local cloud native enthusiasts together. This creates a platform where everyone can share their experiences embarking on their cloud native journeys. Through frequent knowledge sharing, this advances the entire cloud native community as a whole.

Hoon Jo is a Cloud Native and Cloud Solutions Architect at Megazone soft. He had several presentations on cloud-native technologies in Ubucon Asia, Openinfra Asia, HashiTalks, Openstack & Kubernetes Korea and so on. And he relays valuable information from the global to local community and makes clips to understand easily in Korea. My interests are highly are kubernetes and related cloud native products. I am fully sure cloud-native help to change the world as well as business model efficient way. Here is my channel. – Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/HoonJo/ – Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HoonJo

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: In my view, Korea is not rapidly catching up with the latest information from worldwide due to the language barrier and other reasons. Thus, I hope I will relay a lot of highly valuable information from cloud-native resources to Korean communities. Plus, if cloud-native resources could be better digested after cooking, I will cook them to bite easily, such as clips. As an ambassador, it pushes me to be more active and be responsible. It is a really exciting journey in 2023 🙂 hopefully.

Huan has more than 15 years of work experience, and his current focus is cloud-native edge computing, distributed cloud, and high-performance computing. He is currently working as a Senior Technical Director at HarmonyCloud, a company located in Hangzhou, China, providing leading cloud-native products and solutions for hundreds of enterprise customers, including Kubernetes, PaaS, edge computing, micro service visibility, DevOps, etc. In addition, Huan serves as a Technical Steering Committe member of the CNCF edge computing project KubeEdge. Huan is an open source technology enthusiast and is currently committed to building an open source technology ecosystem in China.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The company I work for, HarmonyCloud, is an influential cloud native tehnology supplier in China and a long-term partner of CNCF. HarmonyCloud has helped many customers around the world complete the transformation of cloud-native technology. At the same time, I am currently working as a TSC member in the CNCF Project KubeEdge community, responsible for leading several SIG teams and working with other TSC members towards the graduation of the KubeEdge project. Over the years, I have also given speeches at conferences organized by CNCF. Therefore, I am familiar with the operation process of CNCF projects and understand the job responsibilities of CNCF ambassadors. If I become an ambassador, I will promote the maturity and promotion of Kubernetes, KubeEdge and more open source projects, and help users around the world to apply these advanced and open source cloud-native tenologies.

With over 25 years of experience, James Spurin is an industry veteran skilled in various technical fields and adept at leading Engineering teams in top-tier Financial Services organisations. He now focuses on creating online courses and Technical Educational Content in areas such as DevOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud Native, incorporating hands-on learning experiences through container-based lab environments and has reached over 100,000 students globally. As a CNCF Ambassador, James actively advocates for Container and Cloud Native knowledge, education, and Kubernetes-based orchestration. His company, DiveInto, champions Cloud Native and consistently shares fresh content on its YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/DiveInto James has also established an inclusive community dedicated to Cloud Native learning, which can be accessed at https://community.diveinto.com

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be a CNCF Ambassador as it aligns perfectly with my passion for creating technical educational content on Cloud Native/Kubernetes whilst also Giving Back, a core-principle of the CNCF. The role supports me in more actively engaging with a diverse global community, enabling me to learn from others whilst also sharing my own knowledge and expertise. As an Ambassador, I will contribute to thought leadership in the cloud native space and hope to provide an instrumental role in fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, learning and innovation. Throughout this journey, I am also eager to support and encourage others in pursuing CNCF Cloud Native certifications – an endeavour I am both passionate about and an advocate for. Overall, being a CNCF Ambassador is a highly rewarding and fulfilling experience that allows me to give back to the community while staying updated on the latest developments in the field.

I am a cloud native believer and advocator with over 15 years of experience in cloud computing. I was an early contributor to Kubernetes and led its adoption at eBay for six years. I am currently working as a product and development owner of cloud native FinOps at Tencent Cloud, where I founded the open-source project Crane, which helps users optimize their cloud costs. I am also auther of “The Journey of Kubernetes Production Adoption Success”, translator of “Cloud FinOps”, and speaker on various cloud native topics including Cloud Native Campus in geektime.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be an ambassador because I love cloud native and I want to share my passion and knowledge with others. I think cloud native is the future of software development and it can bring many benefits to users, developers, and businesses. I want to help the cloud native community grow and thrive by contributing to open-source projects, writing books and articles, and organizing events. Being an ambassador will give me more opportunities to connect with other cloud native enthusiasts and learn from their experiences. I hope to inspire more people to join the cloud native journey and make a positive impact on the world.

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.

Josh is passionate about enabling project builders and end users to succeed with cloud computing. He’s a solution architect for Red Hat and leader of CNCF’s TAG App Delivery and WG Platforms. He also leads the CNCF Chicago community group and other Chicago-area groups. Check out Josh’s blog at https://blog.joshgav.com/!

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to continue enabling beginners and experts alike to make the most of cloud computing! As an ambassador I’ll be even more empowered to educate and support Chicago-area developers in our local communities. I’m looking forward to sharing knowledge myself, but most of all I’m looking forward to enabling people in my communities to share their knowledge with each other!

Julia Furst Morgado is a Global Technologist – Office of the CTO 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.

Kunal Kushwaha is a Developer Relations Manager at Civo, where he fosters a deep connection between developers and innovative cloud-native technologies. With a passion for empowering others, Kunal has taught thousands online and consulted numerous companies on their DevOps journey. Recognized as a community leader, he has delivered keynote speeches at global conferences, embodying empathy in all aspects of his work and life.

I am an Open Source Software Engineer at @Diagrid, contributing to and driving initiatives for the Dapr OSS project. I also serve as a Steering Committee member for the Knative Project, and I am Co-Leading the Knative Functions initiative. I’ve been writing on my blog, salaboy.com for over 15 years and I just published a book titled Platform Engineering on Kubernetes for Manning. I previously worked at VMware and Red Hat, building tools to help developers be more productive.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been working on Cloud Native and CNCF communities for over seven years now, and I’ve been constantly trying to give back and connect people who share the same interests around open source projects. Being an ambassador allows me to expand my network to keep connecting, mentoring, and guiding community members to grow.

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.

I’m Obinna Odirionye. I work on Kubernetes Tooling, Infrastructure, and Distributed Systems. I write and speak about Serverless, Containers, and Kubernetes. I am a Co-Maintainer and Member of Helm working on ChartMuseum. I write my thoughts on https://iamobinna.com

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF ambassador, I am passionate about bringing more individuals into the African ecosystem to contribute to the cloud-native community. I have seen the impact that becoming a co-maintainer and member of Helm has had on my career, and I am eager to extend these opportunities to others in my region. By leveraging the resources available through my role as a CNCF ambassador, I can support and mentor curious individuals in their transition into SRE and Kubernetes roles. My goal is to help grow the cloud-native community and positively impact my region.

Oleg is a passionate open source advocate and community builder. He works on user and developer communities around WireMock and WireMock Cloud. He is a core maintainer and board member in Jenkins, maintainer in Keptn and OpenFeature, and a TOC member in the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Oleg has a PhD degree in electronics design and volunteers in the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation. He helps to organize Jenkins, CDF and CNCF meetups in Switzerland.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: CNCF is a driver behind many open source initiatives and industry-wide projects in the areas of observability, software delivery and virtualization. For years I’ve been a user and contributor of many projects, and also advocated for CNCF projects and best practices in my talks. It is an honor to join the CNCF Ambassadors. There are many great folks there, and I am happy to join the team. Looking forward to participating more!

Sessionize profile: https://sessionize.com/onenashev/

Orlin Vasilev aka Orlix is a Senior Community Manager and Engineer(maybe a Dev Rel or even kind a Dev Advocate) at VMware running the communities and maintainer for Project Harbor and Velero. CNCF Ambassador v1 and driving the biggest Meetup Group ~1300 members in Bulgaria. Multiple times KubeCon CfP review board member and co-chair. SysAdmin/Dev/SRE/System engineering roles for over 15 years! Located in Bulgaria, Europe! Father of two – a fantastic girl and a boy! Passionate snowboarder, DIY and semi-professional BBQ Pitmaster and baker!

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being ambassador makes your part of the most fantastic crowd in the Tech World these days. As Ambassador v1 allowed me to drive the meetup and many other local activities with universities and helping put people in general with Cloud Native technologies.

Professional Nerd, SRE and Content Creator. Love advocating for Open-Source and container technologies. I’ve been running a YouTube channel where I share and teach the technologies and good practices I use every day as an SRE.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love teaching and helping people to become better engineers. I love everything open source and what it stands for, knowledge must be shared and everyone should have the opportunity to become better at their jobs.

I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Innablr, a top cloud engineering and platform consultancy in Melbourne. My role involves setting the technology direction for Innablr and guiding our clients through their transformation journey. I’ve been fortunate to work with some big companies in Melbourne, where I’ve helped them modernise their tech stacks with cloud native platforms that deliver applications quickly and securely. I started out as a developer and gradually transitioned to cloud engineering and DevOps. I’m really enthusiastic about the Kubernetes ecosystem and even co-organise the Melbourne Kubernetes User Group. We have recently started the Cloud Sustainability User Group Australia / New Zealand to build the comunity around the topic of sustainability.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled about becoming a CNCF Ambassador because it would serve as validation for the work I’ve done building the Melbourne Kubernetes community over the past few years. As an ambassador, I will have the opportunity to amplify my efforts and further expand the community.

Prithvi Raj has been leading the community efforts for LitmusChaos, the CNCF incubating project based on Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering, and has helped scale a community of 1500+ folks from scratch. He is currently working at Harness as a Technical Community Manager. He has worked on organizing global events, conferences, and meetups such as Chaos Carnival, Kubernetes Community Days Bengaluru & Chennai, CNCF Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetups, and more to help grow various communities in the DevOps ecosystem.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to represent the chaos engineering community as a CNCF ambassador and to also work with fellow ambassadors in helping curate more resources, events, and opportunities for the broader community. As an ambassador, I hope to take forward the cloud-native values amongst various folks keen on joining the ecosystem. I also look forward to learning a lot on this journey from my fellow ambassadors.

I am an OSS addict, an active ArgoCD contributor and a speaker at CNCF events (GitOpsCon, ArgoCon, KubeDay Israel). I also actively encourage and inspire others to contribute to CNCF projects and to speak at conferences. I lead a Cloud Platform Team, and I live in Israel. On 08.10.2023, I was supposed to start a new role – Dev Advocate focused on OSS. On 07.10.2023, my country suffered a deadly terrorist attack and was forced into a war against terror, so all hands on deck. I’m still leading the Platform Team and will re-focus on advocating for OSS when we defeat terrorism. #StandWithIsrael

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love being part of and collaborating with the cloud-native OSS community. In addition to the great benefit of using OSS, I strongly believe that adopting the methodology used to write, maintain and release OSS widely benefits any organization. CNCF makes cloud-native OSS accessible to everyone, and I am excited to take part in fostering the CNCF ecosystem and increasing the OSS adoption.

I am a self-proclaimed “cloud automator”, and works primarily with Microsoft Azure infrastructure, Platform Engineering, DevOps and Cloud Native technology. I am a Microsoft MVP for my work with Azure, and an HashiCorp Ambassador primarily for my work with Terraform. Furthermore, I am active in the CNCF, OpenSSF and several open source communities and projects. I initiated Cloud Native Norway, a non-profit that works to build up and enable Cloud Native adoption and development in Norway. I also co-founded the Azure Cloud Native User Group, and founded the Norwegian PowerShell User Group. In the CNCF, I have been active for years in TAG App Delivery, and currently serves as a maintainer on the OpenGitOps project, and as co-chair of the Platforms Working Group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: For many years, the CNCF has continued to impress me. The way that the foundation has supported the community and the projects is truly admirable. Even though I have other honorary titles, the CNCF Ambassador title is one that I value very much. While I don’t do community work for the titles, I am happy for the recognition. I have big plans for my work in the CNCF, and I look forward to seeing how the ambassador program will help me achieve more for the community.

Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/roberth-strand

Hello! I’m Robin Smorenburg, a passionate technologist with an eye for detail who turned his passion for technology into a career. Throughout my career, I’ve become a respected thought leader in the industry, sharing my knowledge and expertise with others, being recognized by Microsoft, and receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional or MVP Award in the Azure category. With Kevin Evans, I run the StreamingClouds live stream, where we engage with inspiring individuals—our industry’s thought leaders—spreading positivity and sharing their knowledge and advice. And the StreamingClouds Community is a safe place where we’re helping each other, supported by a fantastic group of moderators we can call friends.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m really excited about joining the CNCF on the mission of “making cloud native ubiquitous”. Enhancing my efforts of leading by example, inspiring and helping as many people as possible while being open and inclusive, and treating everyone with the utmost respect. Making a difference through community building and mentoring, impacting the lives of others, leveling the playing field, and fostering community collaboration and relationships. And last but not least, the technologist in me loves cloud-native!

I am Ronit Banerjee, a pre-final year Computer Science Engineering Undergraduate student. Along with my academics, I have maintained a strong portfolio being an Open Source Developer at the projects incubated and graduated from The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. My enthusiasm with DevOps and Cloud Native helped me to secure scholarships like Travel Funding Scholarship and Dan Kohn Scholarship by The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation to attend flagship conferences such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2023 at Shanghai and Open Source Summit Europe 2022 at Dublin. I also worked as an Open Source Developer in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) at DBpedia Association. Apart from my technical experience, I got my hands dirty in fostering the Cloud Native Ecosystem. I am also the Chapter Lead at Cloud Native Hooghly which is an official CNCF Chapter listed amongst 40 such clubs in the Asia Pacific Region. Right now, with the proliferation of the Cloud Native Tools, I successfully turned the chapter to be the fastest growing in the entire Eastern India, catering 250+ Active members. I am also a Sig Contribex’s Comms Volunteer for Kubernetes Contributors Summit North America 2023 at Chicago, United States of America primarily looking into the “Call for Proposal” emails and notifying about the updates to the KubeCon co-located event attendees. I have significant experience in pitching tech products to Venture Capitalists and have successfully secured grants from Government of India twice for my deep-tech startup.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I always wanted to boost Cloud Native Ecosystem in my locality whereas I felt there is a gap of awareness. Being an ambassador, it would really help me to reach areas where I couldn’t do by myself just being a CNCG chapter lead of Hooghly. With CNCF’s support it would be possible.

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.

Saiyam is working as Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo with a focus on defining the Civo cloud platform for simplifying Kubernetes and making it accessible for developers. Previously at Walmart Labs, Oracle, and HP, Saiyam has worked on many facets of k8s including machine learning platform, scaling, multi-cloud, managed k8s services, and k8s documentation. He’s worked on implementing Kubernetes solutions in different organizations. When not coding, Saiyam works on contributing to the community by writing blogs and organizing local meetups for Kubernetes and CNCF. He is also a CNCF ambassador, runs a YouTube channel and Kubesimplify community that aims to simplify cloud native and can be reached on Twitter @saiyampathak

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Simplifying cloud native for everyone

Passionate about Virtualization, Containerization and Observability technologies, I have made it my job. Today, I accompany our customers in their #MoveToCloud transformation mainly on OnPremise environments by maximizing the use of OpenSource products. Much more than just products, OpenSource is for me a philosophy. I love to share and transmit on the subjects which impassion me, I do it with students, conferences, and also by publishing specialized blogs posts.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am very happy and excited to have joined this program. It will allow me to promote the Cloud Native more widely in France. It’s a subject that is still unknown in some companies and the specialized content is often not translated from English. My goal is to promote the power of the Cloud Native through French articles, Meetups, and conferences.

I’ve been involved and passionated by the CNCF community for many years ! I’m co-organizing the Canadian CNCF & Kubernetes meetups for Canada (virtual) and Quebec City / Montreal meetups in person with other wonderful Organizers and Ambassadors ! I’m also a speaker in other meetups, at 2022 KubeCon US and at KubeCon’s Rejeks 2023. I love sharing my experience and documenting. I try to blog my projects and experiences. Check at https://medium.com/@prune998 I’m invested in some CNCF or OSS projects linked to K8s and I’m maintaining an official fork of KubeColor that was unmaintained for years: https://github.com/kubecolor/kubecolor I’ve been patching a lot of projects, OSS or CNCF, like ArgoCD, Cilium, Kafka tools…

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: My goal as an ambassador is to promote Kubernetes and the wonderful ecosystem under the CNCF banner. Being involved in the Ambassador community will help me grow my skills at communicating and hopefully inspire others to join the movement.

Sergio Méndez is a DevOps Engineer at Yalo and professor of operating systems at USAC university. He is getting involved students into the CNCF Ecosystem and hosting a Cloud Native Community group and KCDs in Guatemala. He has been a speaker at several conferences such as KubeCon, WTFisCloudNative, and Kubernetes Community Days. He is also a Linkerd Ambassador and author of the book Edge Computing with Kubernetes with Packt. His website is https://sergiops.xyz.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited because I can help others to learn new technologies and getting involved to participate, also gives me the opportunity to help Latinamerican people to participate in the CNCF ecosystem and students to start contributing in open source. As an Ambassador I can reduce the gap of language creating content in Spanish.

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.

Victor is a passionate Sr. Staff Software Engineer in the Samsung Open Source Group with nearly 18 years of experience in building solutions that are easy to use, scale and adapt. He is a regular speaker at technical conferences in LATAM Open Source communities. Co-chair of the CNF Working Group in the CNCF, and Co-founder of the OpenStackGDL, Cloud-Native El Salvador and Guadalajara communities. Active contributor to CNCF, LFN and Open Infrastructure projects and fervent supporter of the DevOps culture.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Besides the benefits that open source brings to the companies, fundamentally is people who fuel the innovation. Thanks to CNCF Ambassador program, I can be able to amplify the Latin America voice sharing their success local histories and distinct challenges faced by the region.

Viktor Farcic is a lead rapscallion at Upbound and a published author. He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit and a co-host of DevOps Paradox.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Viktor Farcic is excited to join the CNCF Ambassadors program because he believes in the power of open source software to transform the world. He is passionate about helping others learn about and adopt CNCF technologies, and he is eager to contribute to the CNCF community in new and innovative ways. Viktor is also excited to be part of a team of dedicated and talented individuals who are working to make the world a better place through open source software.

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!

Senior cloud native architect and evangelist at Flomesh. I am a seasoned programmer, LF APAC open source evangelist, CNCF Ambassador, member of the cloud native community committee(China local) and Microsoft Azure MVP. With many years of microservice and infrastructure practice experience, mainly involving microservices, containers, Kubernetes, DevOps, etc. In the past there years, I organize two meetups in Guangzhou and Service Mesh Conference in Shanghai together with community members. In the coming April 15, I will organize KCD in Dalian with other community members. I own a Chinese blog https://atbug.com and start writing on Medium https://addozhang.medium.com.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a CNCF ambassador is a recognition of my involvement in open source and cloud-native technology promotion over the past few years. After becoming a CNCF ambassador, I can better promote CNCF technology and organize more in-person and virtual events. At the same time, I can also receive more support from CNCF.

My agenda is taking care of team serving cloud platform and design it’s architecture. I’m a cloud enthusiast who missed events and community in my area. So I have relaunched Cloud Native Prague meetups and I co-organize Kubernetes Community Days Czech & Slovak.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m honored to be an ambassador as I can help with spreading knowledge about fantastic cloud native technologies and connecting people with the same interest. It can help them to solve their issues instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again.