Ambassadors

My current focus is cloud-native computing, programming languages, and system software. I’m working as a compiler developer at secondstate. My blog https://dannypsnl.me writes technical content about formal methods and mathematics. I’m an open source technology enthusiast, and very excited to push formal methods in cloud computing.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m passionate about helping people as I could, been an ambassador is a well way to do so. Besides that, this is a good opportunities do learn from others, like how to maintain communities, or their invaluable personal perspectives.

I have spent the last seven years honing my expertise in the cloud-native ecosystem, with a particular focus on maintaining various communities like Kubernetes, CoreDNS, KNative, and Containerd. While my experience in these areas has been invaluable, my current focus lies in the Cloud OS System. As a seasoned professional, I regularly share my knowledge and insights on cloud-native technologies through my blog, which can be found at ustack.io. Whether you are a novice or a seasoned pro, my blog posts offer practical tips and in-depth analysis that can help you stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving field. So whether you are looking to dive deeper into Kubernetes or explore the latest trends in cloud-native ecosystem, be sure to check out my blog.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: being an CNCF ambassador provides me with the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise in cloud-native technologies with a wider audience, and allows me to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and trends in cloud-native technologies

Xie Ziyi is an active Kubernetes community contributor focusing on documentation and storage.

She is an organizer of the Cloud Native Community Japan, and serves as an instructor for new contributors at Kubernetes Upstream Training Japan.

She has spoken at the Kubernetes Contributor Summit, KubeDay Japan, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan.

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.

Cloud-native community leader, Co-Organizer Azure Tech Group Bangladesh and AWS Cloud Club Captain at BRAC University, passionate about empowering students through open source and cloud technologies. As Bangladesh’s first AWS Cloud Club to reach 1,238+ members, Zaynul has hosted global events featuring AWS leadership, trained 15+ tech professionals in cloud certifications in his study group, and organized KCD Chattogram 2024 with 2,000+ participants. Active contributor on dev.to AWS and Microsoft tag moderation, AWS Builder Center technical blogs, and recognized in AWS PartyRock Hackathon. Driven by democratizing cloud-native education across South Asia, he bridges students with global ecosystems while promoting inclusive tech communities.

Yuanpeng is a kubernetes & cloudnative enthusiast, also is a contributor of kubernetes and karmada, enjoys understanding and using the projects of cncf and enjoy technology advocacy.

Yoshiyuki Tabata is a Senior OSS Consultant at Hitachi, Ltd. As an expert in Identity and Access Management (IAM) and APIs, he has provided numerous consultations over the past decade, including designing API and Authentication/Authorization platforms. He has actively contributed to CNCF TAG Security by facilitating APAC region community calls and leading the IAM white paper project, and he has added significant functionalities to OSS projects such as Keycloak. As a CNCF Ambassador, he has delivered talks at events like KubeCon, Apidays, and Open Source Summit focusing on secure solutions for the CNCF ecosystem. Additionally, as a Cloud Native Community Japan organizer and a Cloud Native Security Japan founder, he has organized several CNCF meetups in Japan.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I aim to improve the adoption and security of CNCF technologies in Japan by sharing my expertise from numerous projects. As a CNCF ambassador, I want to disseminate solutions and best practices for a more secure CNCF ecosystem.

I am married to Adi, father of three, and OpenTelemetry Group Leader at Cisco. My group and I are promoting OpenTelemetry adoption via contributions to the project, publishing blog posts on OpenTelemetry Blog (https://opentelemetry.io/blog/) & Cisco Tech Blog (https://techblog.cisco.com/tags/opentelemetry), and running OpenTelemetry talks & workshops at public events.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I want to promote OpenTelemetry and enable more people to use and contribute to it. I aim to improve the development processes in OpenTelemetry and to make the OpenTelemetry community more welcoming and supportive of new developers. I want to continue advocating for OpenTelemetry by promoting it at global events and helping others do so.

Yash is a passionate advocate for cloud-native technologies and community building. As a pre-final year student pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in India, Yash is deeply involved in the CNCF ecosystem. Serving as a co-organizer of the Cloud-native Thane community, Yash regularly hosts meetups and workshops to foster learning and growth within the community. With active contributions to the Keptn organization, Yash is dedicated to advancing the CNCF mission through leadership, advocacy, and technical expertise.

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.

Experienced Software Engineer / SRE and CNCF Ambassador, Wojciech has 20 years of experience in IT and over a decade with public clouds. Passionate about building local communities, he’s been co-organizing a local meetup in Krakow, Poland, which is part of CNCF Community. Passionate about automating all the things, building scalable and cloud native solutions, Kubernetes. Experienced with startups as well as large, enterprise companies. In free time, passionate about flying drones, solving puzzles and reading.

I’m focused in helping customers designing, building, and running their Kubernetes and Internal Developer Platforms. I wore many hats in the IT world, Engineering, Pre-Post sales, Product Owner and Consulting. from HPC, Storage and Distributed Systems. I also enjoy volunteering at the Dutch Cloud Native/Kubernetes Meetup and the NL KCD. I have lived in many European countries and now Netherlands is the place I call home.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a CNCF Ambassador is the confirmation that my efforts towards the Open Source community are heading in the right direction. I’m excited to help the community and being supported and by the CNCF while doing it

Whitney is a kind and curious human who loves exploring and explaining tools in the cloud native landscape. She has delivered two KubeCon keynotes and countless fun, funny, and informative community talks. She runs a vibrant YouTube channel, co-hosts You Choose!—a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’-style journey through the CNCF landscape—and is also a host of Cloud Native Live and the podcast Software Defined Interviews.

Wendy is a Software Engineer with passion across Platform Engineering, Site Reliability and Observability. In her role, she helps teams build systems that are not just scalable, but reliable and resilient. Wendy is also an open source contributor and has contributed to various aspects of Kubernetes, including SIG Release (serving on the Release Team since v1.31 – v1.34), SIG Cluster Lifecycle and Etcd. She has taken on leadership roles as the Release Signal Lead for Kubernetes v1.33 and Release Lead Shadow for v1.34, where she focuses on improving release processes and mentoring new contributors into the open source space. Wendy is a proud advocate for Women in Tech, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, and Women-led Entrepreneurship. She’s passionate about making complex technologies easy to understand and make the Cloud Native space more inclusive and accessible.

I am the organizer of CNCF Community China, ShenZhen, and the author of , , and , specializing in Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native architecture, and microservices.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m very happy to be part of the new CNCF Ambassador program once again, and to finally be able to bring more technical evangelism to the community and organize community events again!

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.

Vladimir Mikhalev (Valdemar) is a solutions architect and the sole technology leader for North American operations at a Series D enterprise serving Fortune 500 clients, accountable for container platform selection, multi-region AWS architecture, security posture, and the standards other teams build against. He is a CNCF Ambassador and one of fewer than 250 Docker Captains worldwide, holding ten vendor-recognized titles including Docker, IBM, AWS, and HashiCorp.

His current mandate sits where cloud native meets autonomous AI: deciding what untrusted AI coding agents are permitted to touch in production, the isolation boundaries they run inside, how models ship as containerized workloads, and the provenance and policy controls that keep agent-driven delivery auditable under the EU AI Act: Kyverno, Open Policy Agent, signed supply chain artifacts. He set out that architecture in his engineering writing for Docker on isolating untrusted autonomous workloads. Models generate the options; someone is still accountable for the one that ships.

The rest of the platform runs on the same judgment under production consequence: Kubernetes against managed alternatives, what a platform team should be handed and what it should be prevented from doing. He makes those calls for infrastructure spanning Prague and Toronto, runs well-architected reviews on container security posture, and owns the trade-offs he signs off on. A container-first redesign he led was documented by Docker as a 25% infrastructure cost reduction.

He built and operated infrastructure at Amazon, IBM, and Thales, on systems handling millions of requests per minute. The reference architectures he open-sources are decisions he has already shipped: 70+ production-grade deployment blueprints on GitHub, adopted through more than 1,000,000 Docker Hub pulls. He is Technical Editor of Docker and Kubernetes Security (Packt, 2025), and Docker’s CEO has credited his product feedback to internal teams.

He runs the Toronto Cloud-Native & Container AI community, hosts The Verdict, a podcast on container security and AI governance in production, and publishes technical work to more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. As a CNCF Ambassador he makes these architecture calls easier for other teams: runnable reference architectures at heyvaldemar.com, and mentoring engineers moving into cloud native platform work.

Vivian Hu is a Product Manager at Second State and a columnist at InfoQ. She is a founding member of the WasmEdge project. She organizes Rust and WebAssembly community events, especially RustChinaConf in Asia.

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.

I am a software engineer with Adobe, where I am actively involved in managing a cross-cloud, multi-tenant Kubernetes-based platform. My expertise lies in designing and implementing excellent software systems, with over 15 years of experience in the development of large-scale platforms based on Linux and Kubernetes. When I am not coding, I enjoy helping the community by co-organizing OpenSource Bucharest Meetup and KCD Romania.

Toru contributes to OSS as an individual contributor. He is the author and lead developer of youki, an OCI Runtime in Rust, and I am also a maintainer of the OCI Runtime Specification. Additionally, he serves as a reviewer for runwasi and is involved in developing a world that utilizes containers and Wasm. Lately, he has developed an interest in Kubernetes schedulers. Furthermore, he has given presentations at KubeDay Japan and has spoken at various community events in Japan.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The area of container runtime is the unsung hero of the Cloud Native space, where the intricacies of the technology and new features often don’t get the spotlight they deserve. As a developer in this field, I want to help more people become aware of the exciting features it has to offer. I aim to encourage them to take the leap into this fascinating domain! I am also looking forward to assisting the Japanese Cloud Native community in becoming more vibrant on an international level.

Founder and PMC chair of DevStream@CNCF, ex-AWS senior DevOps, ex-Huawei tech expert, cloud architect for Daimler, Tesco, Credit Suisse, and other Fortune 500 corps. Writer at DevOps.com, guest expert at GitGuardian (DevSecOps), blog@Medium: https://medium.com/4th-coffee. Key speaker at the 1st Lisbon K8s meetup. Keynote speaker of BuildStuff 2022. I specialize in DevOps and cloud-related technologies, like CI/CD, developer tools, Terraform, AWS, etc., and I blog on DevOps/DevSecOps.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am truly excited and honored to be an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This opportunity allows me to contribute to the promotion and adoption of cutting-edge cloud-native technologies, which play a crucial role in shaping the future of software development and infrastructure. Being an ambassador also connects me with a vibrant, passionate community of professionals who share insights and experiences, fostering collaboration and innovation. I am genuinely grateful for this chance to learn from others and help drive the industry forward, making a meaningful impact on the cloud-native ecosystem.

Thomas Vitale is a software engineer with a focus on building cloud native solutions, currently working at Systematic in Denmark. He is the author of the “Cloud Native Spring in Action” book and plays an active role in the cloud native ecosystem as a CNCF Ambassador, Co-Chair of the CNCF Application Development Working Group, Oracle ACE Pro, and Testcontainers Community Champion.

A strong advocate of open source collaboration, Thomas contributes to various projects in the Java and cloud-native space, including Spring AI, Testcontainers, Carvel, Dapr, and Buildpacks. He is also passionate about sharing his expertise with the community through talks, workshops, and writing on technical topics.

Tiffany is a CNCF Ambassador, seasoned technologist and content creator in the Cloud Native space. She most recently was a senior developer advocate at VMware. She also formerly worked as a software developer and developer advocate at Amazon, Docker, and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. You can find her at tiffanyfay.dev (and for Bluesky).

Tiago is a Principal Containers Specialist SA at AWS, where he helps startups optimize their container and cloud-native strategies. With experience in DevOps, GenAI, and SaaS architectures, he collaborates with businesses to design scalable and efficient cloud solutions. Tiago also actively contributes to the tech community as an organizer of KCD Brazil and meetups focused on promoting cloud-native technologies.

I’m OSS/Ecosystem Advocate at Sysdig, the company which created and open-sourced Falco, the Security Runtime Engine for Kubernetes and Cloud-Native technologies. I worked for Qonto, a modern banking for SMEs and freelancers, where I managed their Kubernetes clusters and the enthusiastic tools around, like ArgoCD, Traefik, Prometheus. I also assisted for many years pure-players and e-business companies for a large managed service provider, as an AWS expert and FinOps. I’m one of the longest tenured members of the Falco community, and the creator of Falcosidekick and Falcosidekick-UI, two major components of the Falco ecosystem.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an SRE for several years, I’ve been able to use a number of CNCF projects in production. I’m also one of the maintainers of the most advanced OSS security project in the landscape. I would like to help even more architects and users to integrate these projects into their infrastructures. Moreover, in 2024, the KubeCon EU will be in Paris, France, it’s important for me to do my best to help the organizers and show the vitality of French tech.

Thiago is a Principal Platform Engineer at Itau Unibanco, focused on observability, performance, and resilience in large-scale distributed systems. He collaborated on the CNCF Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate (CNPA) certification and supports Cloud Native events in Florianopolis, Sao Paulo, and online. Acting as a connector among multiple Community Groups across Brazil, he strengthens collaboration and knowledge sharing around Kubernetes, Chaos Engineering, and Open Observability.

Taylor Thomas is an Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the creators of Krustlet and Bindle. He is an org maintainer for the wasmCloud project and a participant in the CNCF Wasm Working Group. His work at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft spanned various containers and Kubernetes platforms as well as WebAssembly platforms.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am extremely excited to help the Cloud Native community grow, especially with Wasm. I have been involved in the CNCF for years and am happy to be giving back to a community that got me deeply involved in open source.

Tatiana Mikhaleva is an independent Developer Advocate and founder of DevOps.Pink. A CNCF Ambassador, Docker Captain, and IBM Champion, she holds ambassador roles across eight developer tooling programs in total.

Through DevOps.Pink, Tatiana covers Docker, Kubernetes, and the agentic-AI stack for tens of thousands of engineers worldwide. Her work focuses on making cloud-native tools accessible through walkthroughs, demos, and production-ready code — with a particular emphasis on shipping close to release cycles so the community can learn alongside the newest features.

She runs the Toronto Cloud-Native & Container AI community, speaks across vendor channels on cloud-native tooling, container security, and AI-augmented development, and contributes editorial work on cloud-native developer experience.

A journalist by training, Tatiana brings editorial rigor to technical education, at the intersection of cloud-native practice and the agentic-AI era.

I’m a passionate DevOps Engineer and Solutions Architect with expertise in cloud-native technologies and a strong focus on CNCF projects like ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger. Through my blog posts on Medium, active participation in the CNCF community, and contributions to various projects such as ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts, I aim to promote and educate others about the benefits of cloud-native technologies. As a CNCF member, I continue to support the community through my work with CNCF Projects i’m passionate about like Argo, OpenTelemetry and Jaeger. Connect with me on Medium (https://medium.com/@talyitzhak) to explore real-world production use cases and insights into CNCF technologies.

Passionate about Cloud Native technologies, Open Source, and Artificial Intelligence, I enjoy building platforms just as much as sharing what I learn. In my day-to-day work, I leverage these technologies to design and deliver mission-critical systems for the defense sector. Beyond my professional activities, I actively contribute to the French-speaking Cloud Native community through conferences, community events, technical articles, and knowledge sharing. I strongly believe that Open Source is the greatest driver of innovation we have, and that AI, when developed and used responsibly, will fundamentally transform the way we design, operate, and maintain the next generation of infrastructure.

Hi Team, I am DevOps and MultiCloud Engineer and happy to become a CNCF member to add some input to this journey.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It provides a platform to connect with other professionals in the industry, share knowledge and expertise, and contribute to the growth of the community. As an ambassador, one can learn about the latest developments and trends in the cloud-native ecosystem and play a role in shaping the future of the industry.

Hi My name is Swastik I am an undergrad B.Tech student who is interested in cloud native domain . I have been an GSoC mentee at CNCF and also have been an LFX mentee at kyverno . I am also an lead organizer at CNCF jaipur chapter and sometimes write blog on cloud native topics

Hi, I’m Sven 👋. A cloud native developer, open source contributor and Wasm enthusiast. I’m running the WebAssembly meetup in Munich and serving as tech lead in the TAG Runtime – Wasm working group. You can find me at cloud-native meetups in Hannover and northern Germany.

I’m a researcher at IBM Research – Tokyo, specializing in distributed computing and performance acceleration on cloud platforms. My CNCF journey began as a Kepler maintainer, and I now contribute to Kubernetes and its SIGs. I’m passionate about networking, optimization in autoscaling and scheduling, and observability. I actively engage in community groups to advance cloud-native technologies, and I’m happy to share my knowledge and help new contributors onboard—contributing to the cloud-native community.

Sreejith has been involved with Free and Opensource Software (FOSS) since 2001 in the Kerala region of India. Started working with Kubernetes from 2015 on OpenShift 3 version from Red Hat, helping enterprises choose the right containerized solutions for their mission-critical workloads – both as a technical and salesperson. Currently, Sreejith serves as the organizer of the Cloud Native Kerala chapter. Sreejith was one of the organizers of the first-ever KCD and DevOpsDays event in Kerala that attracted more than 550+ attendees in 2024. Sreejith currently focuses on designing and delivering workshops and tailored training to strategic customers of Red Hat across APAC. https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-kerala/ https://kcdkerala.in/ https://devopsdayskerala.in/

Spas Atanasov is a Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at MariaDB with more than 10 years of experience working with Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. He is a Co-organizer of the Cloud Native Meetups in Bulgaria since 2018, where the community has grown from 20 to over 2000 members, and a Co-organizer of Kubernetes Community Days Sofia. He speaks at meetups and actively mentors people, helping them gain the confidence to step on stage and share their knowledge. His focus areas include Kubernetes at scale, SRE, Cloud Native, Observability, and Cost Optimization. He strongly believes in the power of community and the idea that sharing knowledge can change the way people think and work. Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Spas enjoys baking sourdough bread, making barbecues, and cooking huge stacks of pancakes – but most of all, spending time with his family. He is also known for his favorite question: “Why?”. Why he is motivated: “I love seeing the spark of satisfaction in people’s eyes when I have helped them learn something or see things from a different perspective.”

Hi, I’m Simon Schrottner, dedicated to building vibrant communities and mentoring individuals in the cloud-native ecosystem. I’m primarily focused on OpenFeature, a vendor-neutral open standard for feature flag management, where I work to drive innovation and adoption. I’m deeply committed to open source and love contributing to projects that empower developers and organizations to embrace scalable, modern solutions. I also enjoy connecting with the global tech community, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on exciting cloud-native initiatives

Simon Forster is a cloud native technology architect and engineer based in London. Simon has extensive experience working in heavily regulated financial institutions on the design, delivery and security of critical cloud native applications. He has a specific focus on ensuring cloud native technologies deliver against business goals. As co-chair of the CNCF Cartografos Group, Simon developed and co-authored the CNCF Cloud Native Maturity Model and the CNCF children’s book “Admiral Bash’s Island Adventure”. He has contributed to both the Business Value Subcommittee and Financial Services User Group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a longtime member of the cloud native community, I’m excited to evangelise its mission. I look forward to mentoring and training members of the community, no matter the technical skill set, to better understand why cloud native serves digital innovation and meets business goals. I strongly believe that every person in the community can help drive cloud native forward and am excited to help achieve this goal.

Shu Muto is a Principal Software Engineer at NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd., a company within the NEC group.

He serves as one of the maintainers for Kubernetes Dashboard and holds the position of chair for SIG UI.

Since 2019, Shu has been organizing Kubernetes Upstream Training sessions in Japan, dedicated to training both contributors and mentors, and to promote the culture of open source.

• Kubernetes Upstream Training in Japan
• Kubernetes Upstream Training in remote

The following presentations were given in relation to Kubernetes Upstream Training:

• [KCSNA2019] How to Hold Upstream Training in Your Country and Get New Contributors! – Shu Muto, Kenichi Oomichi, Akihito Inoh
• [KCSNA2022] How Kubernetes upstream training has been held in Japan for four years, getting over the COVID-19 situation – Shu Muto, Xie Ziyi
• [KubeDay Japan 2024] Keynote: Empowering Japanese Contributors: Kubernetes Upstream Training – Shu Muto, Ziyi Xie

In addition, he serves as an organizer for the CNCF chapter in Japan, CNCF Cloud Native Community Japan, which was launched in November 2023.

He hopes to spread the culture of development within the open source community more than ever before and promote collaboration among developers around the world.

Shimon co-organizes the CNCF chapter in Tel Aviv, In addition, he is also the co-organizer of KCD Israel. He also creates tutorial videos about cloud-native technology and Kubernetes.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be a CNCF ambassador as I believe in the CNCF philosophy of being a vendor-agnostic and open-source foundation. I wanted to become a CNCF Ambassador to continue performing community activities involving the CNCF and open-source projects and host meetups and events like the KCD.

Shivay Lamba is a software developer specializing in DevOps, Machine Learning and Full Stack Development. He is an Open Source Enthusiast and has been part of various programs like Google Code In and Google Summer of Code as a Mentor and has also been a MLH Fellow. He is actively involved in community work as well. He is a TensorflowJS SIG member, Mentor in OpenMined and CNCF Service Mesh Community, SODA Foundation

DevOps Engineer, Organiser @CNCG Ahmedabad, Public Speaker, Community Contributor, Kubernetes, AWS Certified Solution Architect (SAA-C03), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003), CKA

Shivanshu is a Founding Engineer at SigNoz (YC-W21), he is deeply engaged in the fields of deep technology and open-source software, he is a contributor and organization member of CNCF projects such as OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and Istio. He has served as a mentor in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program, guiding contributors and fostering the growth of the open-source community. Shivanshu has presented his work at renowned global conferences, including AI_Dev, the GSoC Mentor Summit, IstioCon, and KubeCon, showcasing his expertise and commitment to advancing open-source innovation. He is available for connections on LinkedIn, Twitter, or through CNCF Slack.

Shardul Srivastava is the Head of Infrastructiure working at Ratepay. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the co-organizer of the CNCF Kualalumpur. He helped curate KubeWeekly newsletter for the past 1 year and authored the contribution guidelines for the newsletter. He is passionate about Kubernetes and actively contributes to CNCF projects.

Hey! I’m Shedrack Akintayo! I love to write, code, and teach. I’m trying to embrace constant learning, and growing. I’m currently working towards becoming a better version of myself. I am currently a Technical Marketing Engineer, Isovalent at Cisco responsible for running the Cilium and eBPF communities. I’m skilled in DevOps with Go, Linux, Shell Scripting, Terraform, Cloud Native Technologies (Kubernetes, Cilium)

Dr. Shane Wang is an engineering director of Cloud Native China at Software and Advanced Technology Group in Intel. He and his team have been working on open source cloud software for many years since 2012, including Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, containerd, serverless, edge, Ceph and OpenStack etc. He is an individual director of OIF foundation, alliance committee chair of SODA foundation, a TOC member of Mulan open source community, and one of the standing committee members of Open Source Development Committee in China Computer Federation (CCF), and one of Tencent Cloud Valuable Professionals. He organizes and runs cloud native meetups with China partners primarily in Shanghai and Beijing, focusing on Kubernetes, Istio and Envoy technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Because with that I can organize regular meetups better in China with the local community including Tetrate, DaoCloud, Alauda, Alibaba and Tencent etc. bridging between CNCF and many China-based open source communities, I can drive more engineering contributions to CNCF projects and engagements with China customers for adoption. I’m also able to contribute more technical materials to CNCF Webinars and Blogs, etc. and pursue more presentation opportunities at CNCF conferences e.g. KubeCon China.

Seungkyu Ahn is a senior IT leader with 30+ years of expertise in AI, Cloud Native, and Enterprise architecture

• Kubernetes & AI Infrastructure: Extensive experience building Kubernetes platforms for finance and telco. Currently researching secure AI serving via GPUs and network optimization using eBPF.
• Cloud & OpenStack: Led the design and operation of global Private Cloud data centers across Korea, China, and the US, resolving complex infrastructure challenges in storage and networking.
• Enterprise Leadership: Expert in architecting and operating large-scale systems under high demand. Led multidisciplinary teams of up to 100 members through year-long projects, including critical version upgrades and system stabilizations.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador:I am deeply passionate about advancing the adoption and understanding of cloud-native technologies, particularly within the Korean technical community. Throughout my professional journey, I have been dedicated to open source advocacy, technical education, and community leadership, with a focus on bridging the gap between global cloud-native advancements and local practitioners. Notably, I have taken a leading role in organizing KCD Seoul and have served as an organizer for the Cloud Native Community Groups (Seoul), effectively acting as an ambassador for CNCF within Korea. Through these activities, I have empowered Korean developers and organizations to fully leverage CNCF projects by providing timely, accessible, and high-quality technical content, workshops, and mentorship programs. I am committed to reducing language and cultural barriers by localizing key resources, fostering inclusive community spaces, and encouraging active participation in global CNCF initiatives. As a CNCF Ambassador, I aim to be a trusted liaison, ensuring that the Korean community not only keeps pace with global trends but also contributes meaningfully to the evolution of the cloud-native ecosystem.

Sergio Méndez is a Systems Engineer, Professor at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC), and CNCF Ambassador specializing in Cloud Native technologies, Kubernetes, and open source. He is the author of Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes, founder of Curzona, an online learning platform for Cloud Native and emerging technologies, and is currently leading KubeMaya, a Kubernetes-based edge computing project developed in collaboration with Guatemalan archaeologists for archaeological research.

I’m a Open Source mega fan, part of Cloud Native Santiago, Open Source Santiago and DevOps Days Santiago, finally a Developer Advocate from the hearth

Seokho Son is a senior researcher and open source special fellow at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a national research institute in South Korea. His primary responsibilities include designing systems and devising algorithms for cloud and cloud-native computing to accomplish national research projects. He is one of the maintainers of the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary which aims to define cloud native concepts in clear and simple language, and he is contributing to Kubernetes by leading the Korean localization team in Kubernetes SIG-Docs and maintaining localization in Kubernetes/website. Furthermore, he is one of the maintainers of Cloud-Barista, a multi-cloud management platform. As an open source advocate, Seokho has served as a speaker at various cloud native events, including Cloud Native Community Groups and Kubernetes Forum in South Korea, and he is actively involved in mentoring open source contribution programs in South Korea.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to have become a CNCF Ambassador and excited to continue contributing to cloud-native technology. I have been working on reducing language barriers in cloud-native technologies by localizing technical documents in Kubernetes, and maintaining the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary project to make cloud-native concepts accessible to anyone, regardless of their technical background. Through my community activities, I have had the pleasure of meeting many talented and friendly contributors, and I look forward to continue developing these relationships. I believe that being a CNCF ambassador is an extraordinary opportunity for me to spread cloud-native technologies even further. As a CNCF Ambassador, I am aiming to be a reliable source of information for the Korean community by sharing the latest technology information and community trends in a timely manner, and I hope to inspire Korean experts to get involved in global activities.

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.

Seema Saharan is working as an SRE in Autodesk. I am an IT enthusiast, who is passionate about all the latest technologies from a research perspective. I love to help, mentor people, and share my knowledge. I do that through my blogs, videos, and meetups.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF ambassador is an exciting opportunity for me, who is passionate about cloud-native technologies, which enables me to promote these cutting-edge technologies, engage with a vibrant community, share my knowledge, network with industry professionals, and contribute to open-source projects. It offers opportunities for personal and professional growth, as well as the chance to influence the direction of the CNCF community and its projects.

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.

Savitha Raghunathan is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, currently focusing on Application Modernization and Cloud Native adoption. Her role as a maintainer for the CNCF Sandbox project Konveyor has provided her with valuable insights into the growing demand for modernizing critical applications to align with cloud-native technologies, thereby deepening her understanding of the application lifecycle. In her previous position, Savitha worked as a platform engineer, where she dedicated herself to building internal developer platforms using Kubernetes and other cloud native projects.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Contributing to CNCF projects has been incredibly fulfilling, and the support and positivity I’ve experienced from the community during difficult periods, including the pandemic, have deepened my bond with this community. This role as a CNCF Ambassador has given me a chance to reciprocate that support, share my valuable experiences, and facilitate the onboarding of new contributors and adopters into the CNCF ecosystem.

I have spent most of my career in the infrastructure space, working with both proprietary and open source solutions for infrastructure automation. My involvement in open source projects has allowed me to be involved in many different projects, from being a project lead, active presenter and evangelist, or just casual contributor. I have helped run local meetups for Open Infrastructure MN and MN Python User Group, and spoken at or supported other meetups and events around the world.

Satyam is an OSS Developer at Devtron.ai, working at the intersection of AI and cloud-native technologies. He contributes to open-source projects and has been part of the Kubernetes release team since v1.30, recently supporting release engineering.

Sascha works on many different container related open-source projects like Kubernetes and various container runtimes. He joined the CNCF community back in 2018, having gained container experience before. Sascha’s passions include contributing to open source, as well as giving talks and evangelizing Kubernetes-related technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to act as CNCF ambassador because mentoring and onboarding new people into the community is one of my passions! The CNCF ambassador program provides me a bigger context to connect with new and existing community members. It also makes it easier for me to boost the visibility of open source projects while evangelizing best practices, code of conduct and openness.

I started my journey in Tech Marketing in 2016, and in 2021, I embarked with SIGHUP on the Cloud Native industry as a complete newbie. For the first six months, I felt overwhelmed by the vastness and complexity of the field, but then something amazing happened along the way – thanks to my stubbornness and the patient support of my colleagues, I actively started contributing to the Cloud Native community and found a perfect place to express my skills while helping others, organizing events, and supporting projects – I’m a KCD Italy and Cloud Native Milano Meetup organizer and part of the Glossary Italian Localization Group. All that apart, I’m music-passionate and a restless shower performer, a winter couch knitter and cat cuddler, a balcony gardening ace, a dabble baker, and a great backwarmer during adventurous motorcycle journeys.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a non-tech member and a proud CNCF ambassador, I’m determined to lend my support in any way possible. I’m here to share the lessons I’ve learned, contribute to the growth of our community, and empower others to discover the Cloud Native Community and find their own path. I want to be a guiding hand to help others navigate CNCF initiatives and projects. It’s all about showing that there are different ways to contribute and various subgroups tailored to their expertise.

Sandipan enjoys collaborating with people on developing software. He is a Member, Community Manager, and part of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group and the Contributor Communications team at Kubernetes. Sandipan has been a Mentee at CNCF under the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program, where he worked on Cilium, and a Google Summer of Code Contributor 2024 at Kubeflow. As a participant in CNCF Security Slam 2023, he has also contributed to improving the security hygiene of Kubernetes subprojects. Sandipan is a CNCF Community Groups Organizer of the Kolkata chapter.

Saloni Narang is the co-founder of KubeSimplify, where she leads content strategy and development for the Kubesimplify YouTube channel, making cloud-native technologies accessible to all. She has helped organize meetups in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chandigarh, creating spaces for Kubernetes enthusiasts to connect and learn. Saloni has spoken at KubeCon Paris and will be presenting at the upcoming KubeCon North America. https://kubesimplify.com/

Hello, my name is Saim Safdar, working as a Developer Relations Manager at Rafay Systems, host of the cloud-native podcast (https://www.youtube.com/@cloudnativefm), co-founder of Cloud Native Islamabad (https://community.cncf.io/islamabad/), Organizer of KCD Pakistan (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/03/10/from-community-group-to-event-a-kcd-pakistan-experience/). Maintainer of the cncf Sandbox project, Paralus (https://www.paralus.io/).

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love sharing my Open Source jourey with others, currently there’s a desparate need of mentorship within the community, as cloud native eco-system constantly equipped with new tooling, students, tech pro, difficult to find and map existing knowledge to work with OS and communities, I’m hoping my time as an Ambassador, I’ll get on-board and shortened the loop for code to contribution to outreaching new OS tooling to the world.

Sai is currently working as Senior Solutions Architecture Specialist, APJ at HashiCorp and is based out of Singapore. Sai started his career in Networking and had 17 years of experience in private/public cloud infrastructure solutions for highly regulated security-conscious industries such as Banking, Financial Services Industries, Aviation, ISPs and Public Sector organizations across APJ Region. Previously He was part of the Field Engineering team at solo.io, Professional Services Consultant (APJ) at chef.io. He focuses on modernizing infrastructure automation and microservices application networking from Edge to Service Mesh at scale, where the tech stacks are built on HashiCorp Vault, Consul, Boundary, Terraform, Chef, Istio, Envoy Proxy, eBPF, Cilium, GraphQL built for Kubernetes, VMs & Cloud.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Singapore and ASEAN Region need more active and organized meetups around cloud native community. The activities are behind compare to US, EMEA and ANZ Region. As an ambassador, I will continue to create more awareness and advocate CNCF projects in Singapore and ASEAN Region. I am also participating for the KubeDay Singapore as one of the event chairs, and continue to contribute. I’m very proud of being CNCF Ambassador and representing CNCF in Singapore and APAC Region.

Working as MTS3 Site Reliability Engineer at VMWare Software India PVT. LTD. Cloud Native Day Pune (CND Pune’23) Organizer Kubernetes Community Day Pune (KCD’24) Organizer Open-Source Enthusiast, A firm believer in the power of community education. Google Summer Of Code Admin since 2018, Mentor, Mentee 2022 @PEcAn Project GSoD, GSSoC, Github Externship, SIH mentor CKS | CKA | CKAD | Terraform Certified Mentored 10k+ students & professionals for free across India for career guidance, Job Search, Open Source, Cloud Native Docker & CNCG Pune community leader Enjoys photography, Acting, Teaching, Trekking, fitness

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been organising monthly meetups under CNCG Pune chapter, have been sharing my knowledge by speaking at different events, conferences, rural area colleges, schools, local meet-up groups to spread awareness and share knowledge about cloud native. By becoming CNCF Ambassador I will get more support, training, mentorship, guidance and rewards to build stronger community which will open wide door of the opportunities – to network with other community leaders, CNCF leaders and share my knowledge to wider audience. As part of CNCF Ambassador, it will give me opportunity to network with equally passionate Ambassadors from all over the globe. CNCF Ambassador gets support, mentorship, trainings, funding to host the events which will help me a lot to foster a strong community and upcoming events. It will give me the opportunity to promote Cloud Native technologies projects globally.

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.

I am a cloud native developer and advocator with over 6 years of experience in cloud native community. I was a cloud native infrastructure SRE and early Kubernetes contributor. I am currently working as a Senior R&D Engineer in Machine Learning Platform team at Tencent. I have participated in multiple cloud native projects and now I am working on cloud native AI infrastructure. I am also a co-author of “Istio Handbook”, traslator of “Distributed Machine Learning Pattern” and speaker of KubeCon.

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.

Ronald Petty works as a principal consultant at RX-M, providing engineering and advisory services around Cloud Native and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Ron participated in creation of some of the Kubernetes certifications and has held all of them. He is also the chair of the Internet Society – US San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, volunteer member of the SF Bay ACM and IEEE. As member/co-lead of the CNCF AI WG, works to add clarity around AI and CN technology integration. The following white paper is an example of this groups contribution to the community, https://www.cncf.io/reports/cloud-native-artificial-intelligence-whitepaper/.

A seasoned IT professional with over 22 years of experience, starting as a Windows systems administrator. I now co-host De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast, delivering accessible Kubernetes insights to both beginners and experienced IT professionals in the Netherlands. I’m actively involved in CNCF initiatives, organizing and speaking at meetups, and hosts community events like Kubernetes Community Days.

I am honored to continue serving in this role. Over the past few years, My company DaoCloud has made continuous contributions to the open-source community. Our contributions to Kubernetes, a core cloud-native project, have ranked among the top three globally over the past year. In 2022, we will also take on a contributing seat on Istio’s steering committee. We have independently open-sourced nine projects, including Clusterpedia, Merbridge and Piraeus which have successfully entered CNCF Sandbox incubation. DaoCloud continues to contribute significantly towards cloud-native technology and improve CNCF’s technical ecosystem.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Firstly, I hope that cloud-native technology will remain highly connected to China, and that the integration of the technology world will not be affected by geography, politics, international conflicts and other factors. Secondly, I hope that cloud-native technology can break through the barriers between technology and users, and that more end-user voices can be fed back to CNCF. Thirdly, I hope to promote the building of cloud-native technology talent and further improve the cloud-native education system, so that CNCF will become a sustainable organization.

Rohit Ghumare is a recognized Google Developer Expert in AI and Cloud, Docker Captain, Platform Ambassador, CNCF Marketing Chair 2025 a testament to his adeptness in contemporary cloud solutions. Contributed to Platform Engineer Associate exam and Certified Backstage Exam. He is the driving force behind several community-centric initiatives, orchestrating events as the organizer of KCD UK, Cloud Native Westminster London, DevOpsDays Bengaluru, KCD Mumbai, Google Cloud Mumbai, and the Cloud Native Thane community group. Through these platforms, he not only showcases his profound expertise but also fosters a collaborative ecosystem for knowledge exchange. A prolific writer, Rohit has authored a plethora of blogs and insightful pieces on CNCF projects, including, but not limited to, Backstage, Istio, Kubernetes, Cilium, Envoy, Prometheus, and Kiali. This extensive coverage underscores his profound understanding and engagement with cutting-edge cloud-native technologies. Besides penning down his knowledge, Rohit is dedicated to sharing his insights through the “Cloud Native Talks” podcast, which he hosts, and through global conferences and local meetups where he’s presented multiple talks. He has also been a program committee member for Kubecon co-located events. Links: devopsguys.in

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being appointed as an ambassador presents a remarkable opportunity to further extend the outreach of my engagement within the tech community, particularly in the realms of DevOps and Cloud Native technologies. It will help me to give back to the community by sharing insights from experts located all over the world.

I am a self-proclaimed “cloud automator”, and I work at Sopra Steria based out of Oslo, Norway. I have been granted the title of Microsoft MVP for my work with Azure, and I have been an active contributor in the CNCF for which I earned the title Cloud Native Ambassador. 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 co-chair for the TAG, 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 create content around CNCF projects, building enablement content around CNCF projects. I help contribute around marketing and community efforts with CNCF projects. I am a new code contributor to a CNCF project

Rishit is a CS student at the University of Toronto. He spends most of his time researching and working with learning algorithms and vision. Currently, he also works as a research scientist intern at Qualcomm Research. He also maintains/contributes extensively to popular open-source projects like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubernetes, and Kubeflow among others and also frequently works on building new open-source projects. You will also often find him speaking at a CNCF conference.

I’ve been Automating toil in Linux for over 20 years, but when Kubernetes came along I was initially dismissive, after all I was already building everything in Containers with Docker and orchestrating in a variety of semi-manual ways. I’ve since come to appreciate all Kubernetes can do and also what its limitations are and when NOT to use it. I’ve taught DevOps courses and Kubernetes courses while also helping large enterprises setup internally managed Kubernetes platforms with a product based mindset. I believe that security is so fundamental to everything that we do, we shouldn’t be shoving it in as an afterthought with DevSecOps. Now, you’ll find me at Cloud Native Melbourne (or almost any other Kubernetes/Platform Engineering meetup in Melbourne), organising CloudCon AU or spruiking Toastmasters. I’ll be virtually present in FINOS Common Cloud controls or the APAC Security and Compliance TAG

Rey Lejano is Solutions Architect at Red Hat and currently serves as co-chair for Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) Docs and helps maintain the upstream Kubernetes documentation. Rey leads the Kubernetes SIG Security Third-Party Security Audit subproject and helped release the last Kubernetes security audit in April 2023. He is a member of seven Kubernetes Release Teams, including serving as the 1.23 Release Lead and 1.25 Emeritus Adviser. Rey was awarded the CNCF Community Award for Top Documentarian in 2022 and Kubernetes Contributor Awards in 2021 from SIG Release and 2023 from SIG Security. He is working on KCD San Francisco Bay Area and cloudnativeessentials.com to help the people to start on their cloud native journey.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Community propels open source projects to flourish. I’m excited to be an ambassador to help grow the cloud native community by providing mentorship to new contributors, guidance to those starting on their cloud native journey, and amplifying the excitement for cloud native technology.

Ricardo is a Cloud Native AI Lead at Snowflake. He’s an open source enthusiast, co-chairing the CNCF TAG-Runtime, lead for the Cloud Native AI Working Group and CNCF Ambassador. Recently, he led the publication of the Cloud Native AI Whitepaper and is currently leading various initiatives in the Cloud Native AI Working Group. He has worked in tech and software engineering roles for over 25 years. He comes from a diverse professional background, having held different roles at large companies such as Rakuten, Cisco, and VMware and startups such as Truera, Branch Metrics and Coupa.

I am an OSS Tech Lead at Codefresh by Octopus Deploy, an ArgoCD maintainer and involved with the Argo community. I am also 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.

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.

Raphaël Pinson is a seasoned Solutions Architect with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. He specializes in Kubernetes, Terraform, and Cilium, and currently works at Isovalent. Raphaël is passionate about bridging the gap between DevOps and Cloud Native communities, and he’s excited to represent CNCF as a co-organizer of the Swiss Romandie (Lausanne chapter) CNCF meetup and regular speaker at industry events. Raphaël has contributed to various CNCF projects. His public work can be found at https://polywork.com/raphink.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to become a CNCF ambassador because it allows me to expand my impact and bring Cloud Native technology to a wider audience. By representing CNCF and bridging the gap between Cloud Native and other communities, I hope to further advance our industry’s growth and adoption. It’s an honor to be part of a community of talented and passionate advocates who are driving innovation and making a difference in the tech world.

Focus on Cloud Native Data and Machine Learning. Organizer at Cloud Native Nordics and Cloud Native Aarhus. Speaker at more than 40 events a year, e.g. industrial events (OT), Mini MBA in AI, CNCF events, private company events.

I’m Ramesh Kumar, a cloud-native advocate and mentor who believes technology is at its best when it lifts people up. As organizer of the CNCF/Kubernetes meetups in Sacramento and Penang, and a proud contributor who helped inspire and shape the Kubestronaut program, I’ve had the privilege of guiding 1500+ students and professionals, both online and offline, toward Kubernetes certifications and new career milestones.

My passion is simple: turn complex technology into approachable, empowering journeys, especially for newcomers finding their footing. Through mentoring, teaching, and community building, I strive to create spaces where knowledge is shared freely and everyone feels they belong.

Recently, I’ve begun weaving Anthropic’s Claude into my Kubernetes workshops, and it has been humbling to watch learners who once felt lost now debug faster, decode complex configs, and step forward as confident cloud-native practitioners. For me, AI isn’t about replacing the human touch, it’s about opening the door a little wider so no one is left behind on their journey.

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.

Raj is an accomplished Staff Software Engineer at Harness with over 5+ of experience, making significant strides at a leading Unicorn Startup. His journey in the tech industry is marked by a series of noteworthy contributions. Additionally, Raj plays a crucial role as a current maintainer of LitmusChaos, underlining his deep commitment to open-source projects. Raj’s contributions also extend to other CNCF projects, where he is an active contributor to Prometheus, Kyverno and SigNoz. Balancing roles as a developer by day and SRE by night, he is passionate about building resilient systems and fervently advocates for cloud-native best practices. Raj has shared his expertise at various international conferences, including KubeCon, engaging with the global tech community.

Rafael “Rafa” Brito has over 30 years of industry experience in distributed computing, Kubernetes, Cloud, grid/HPC, and high-frequency trading infrastructure (HFT). Rafa is a principal engineer at StormForge by CloudBolt, dedicated to delivering Kubernetes optimization and scalability to customers. Before joining StormForge, Rafa worked at VMware, Citigroup, and NYSE. Rafa co-organizes the KCD Texas and CNCF Austin Community Group, and he serves as co-chair of CNCF TAG Operational Resilience (as of 2025-2026). Rafa is the co-author of the best-selling book “Acing the CKA Exam” 2nd Edition. When not working with Kubernetes, you’ll find Rafa training for marathons at the Lady Bird Trail in Austin, TX, and fanatically rooting for his Brazilian soccer team, Flamengo.

Freelance cloud architect, OSS addict, huge fan of k8s, cilium, argocd and friends. I speak regularly about cloud tech, security and OSS projects I use or implement for my clients. I run several meetups in my city Docker, CNCF Lyon, DevSecCon France, co-organize conferences (KCDFRANCE) and involved regularly as conference MC and member of CFP committee , more importantly I’m a happy husband and dad

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m freaking excited to join the ambassador community.To meet new friends, help growing communities, sharing the skills I’ve learned and give back to the CNCF community. Being an ambassador will allow me to what i love the most, mentoring, i can’t wait to jump in !

Qing Hao is a senior software engineer at Red Hat. She loves open source and sharing, she is a maintainer of Open Cluster Management and enjoys writing blogs to share new developments in the community. She has been involved in numerous open source activities over the past few years, including being a speaker at KubeCon, a mentor for OSPP and GSoC many times. She has hosted many open source meetups in Xi’an as early as 2015, and she is now one of the organizers of KCD.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am passionate about open source and sharing, and becoming an ambassador would provide me with more opportunities and motivation to do what I love. I’ve witnessed the CNCF project’s remarkable growth in recent years, and now, with the rise of AI, it’s thriving more than ever. As an ambassador, I look forward to helping more people and projects benefit from open source, which is one of the most exciting aspects of this role.

Puja Abbassi is the Vice President of Product at Giant Swarm, building a managed cloud native developer platform based on Kubernetes. In Kubernetes he focuses on extending Kubernetes with custom resources and controllers. With many years of Kubernetes experience and having been in the beta batch of CKAs, he enjoys solving problems and helping people in the community, mainly within SIG Contributor Experience. He used to also be a contributor to the CIS Kubernetes Benchmarks. I blog at https://www.giantswarm.io/blog/author/puja-abbassi and sometimes on the CNCF or other community blogs.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF ambassador, I’m passionate about bringing cloud native technologies to more developers and their organisations around the globe. Especially, as the community is growing both from a project perspective as well as on the end user side, I’m excited to bring the two closer together and see how we can enable end user organisations to build cloud native platforms using CNCF projects.

Sessionize Profile: https://sessionize.com/puja

Prithvi Raj is working as a Community Manager & Developer Advocate at Mirantis and is leading the community efforts for the Open Source Program Office at Mirantis including the k0s project, k0smortron, and the other OSS projects Mirantis is contributing to. He previously led the LitmusChaos project community, the CNCF incubating project based on Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering, and has helped scale a community of 3000+ folks from scratch. He is also a CNCF Ambassador and has closely worked with the CNCF community to run LFX Mentorship programs and helped build a Chaos Engineering community in the CNCF ecosystem. He has worked on 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. He started his journey in 2020 at MayaData and has been passionately helping build the Chaos Engineering community since, being part of ChaosNative and previously Harness.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to represent the k0s 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.

Priyanka Saggu is a Kubernetes Integration Engineer at SUSE. She has made significant contributions to the Kubernetes project via Special Interest Groups – Release, ContribEx, Testing and CLI. She’s the Release Lead for Kubernetes v1.29 release cycle, and is the Emeritus Advisor for the upcoming Kubernetes v1.31 release cycle. Priyanka is also the Technical Lead for the Kubernetes SIG – Contributor Experience (ContribEx) and a GitHub Admin for the Kubernetes project’s GitHub organizations. In the past, she has held leadership roles such as Release Lead Shadow for v1.27 and v1.26, Enhancement Lead for v1.25, and has been part of the Release Team since v1.23. She actively mentors new contributors and coordinates the Meet Our Contributor – APAC initiative under SIG ContribEx to promote the achievements of active contributors.

Pranshu is a Kubernetes SIG Instrumentation co-chair, a NodeJS emeritus, and a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. He has embraced Open Source throughout the years as a mentee, and a mentor, for various code programs. He enjoys helping the cloud ecosystem by building critical APIs, tools, and driving impactful discussions in the Observability space.

Praseeda Sathaye is a Principal Specialist Solution Architect for App Modernization and Containers at Amazon Web Services, based in the Bay Area, California. She specializes in accelerating cloud-native adoption, modernizing platform infrastructure, and architecting microservices using Kubernetes, GitOps, and service mesh. Praseeda has published highly acclaimed workshops and blogs on Amazon EKS, Karpenter, and Istio-on-EKS, which have been widely praised for their educational value. She is an active contributor to the open-source community, having helped add Amazon EKS usecase to Istio documentation. Praseeda is an engaging presenter at major conferences like Grace Hopper, KubeCon and GitopsCon for her ability to make complex topics relatable. With over 25 years of experience in leading, designing, and architecting software products across various domains, Praseeda is an inspirational role model who empowers women and minority groups in the tech industry through her teaching, mentoring, presenting, contributing, and evangelizing efforts.

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.

Phil is a Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on core container technologies that power AWS container compute offerings. Phil is currently an active contributor and maintainer for containerd, a graduated CNCF project, and participates in the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the member of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Phil enjoys helping others understand and implement container and cloud native concepts and speaks worldwide at industry conferences and meetups on behalf of AWS and his open source roles.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador for the express purpose of helping others understand the world of containers and, specifically, the core container runtime technology and standards that enable and power that world. Having been involved in the CNCF since nearly its beginning, I know that it can be an overwhelming place for newcomers at it has grown, and as an ambassador, I’m happy to play a part in helping people understand and navigate the projects and work of the CNCF.

I am an active member of the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/cloudnative.tw) at Taiwan with extensive experience and skills. I am passionate about sharing my knowledge and experiences, irregularly organizing Meetup events (https://community.cncf.io/kcd-taiwan/) to provide professional expertise on Kubernetes and CNCF technologies. In addition, I also run my own blog, where I share practical information and experiences related to Kubernetes and container technologies. Please feel free to visit my blog at https://blog.pichuang.com.tw

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because I believe in the program’s value and the chance to connect with like-minded individuals. It’s rewarding to represent the program’s values and contribute to the community’s awareness and adoption of the technology.

Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/pichuang

Paula is part of the organising committee for Kubernetes Community Days UK, DevOpsDays London, FastFlowConf, and the London Platform User Group. In her day job, Paula is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Syntasso. She is passionate about community, diversity and inclusion, enjoys speaking at events like KubeCon and also cohosted the first Platform Engineering colocated day at KubeCon Paris. In her spare time, Paula enjoys walking her dog and attempting to run half-marathons.

Paul is a Software Architect and Developer Advocate. In his many roles, he has encouraged developers and testers alike to “shift left,” bringing reliability testing earlier in the software development process. As a software engineer/architect for over 20 years in varying languages, he now focuses more on the Go programming language. Active in the community, he organizes the St. Louis chapter of Cloud Native Community Groups and the StLGo Meetup group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a technologist, I became enamored with cloud-native technologies as soon as I was exposed. Events like KubeCon only supercharged my excitement for the overall CNCF project landscape. As a CNCF Ambassador, I’m hoping my enthusiasm for all things cloud-native will spread to those I meet at local events. I feel this platform will allow me to become more engaged as an advocate for CNCF projects, helping the community to gain more knowledge of opportunities and to encourage more active roles in open source contributions.

Professional Nerd, SRE and Content Creator. Love advocating for Open-Source and container technologies. Runs a YouTube channel where he shares and teaches the technologies and good practices he uses every day as an SRE at Bitso.

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.

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 am a Senior Principal Software Engineer working at IBM on messaging and data streaming technologies. One of these is Strimzi, a CNCF project for running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes in a cloud native manner using operators. I am also a committer on a number of IoT related projects and interested in observability and metrics – as a side project I look at how Formula 1 telemetry can be analysed with the technologies I work with every day. I am based in Napoli, where I am the lead organiser of the local CNCF Meetup.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I feel that I am one of the lucky people who love their job because it’s also their passion. Taking this passion to the community by sharing my knowledge about open source technologies is something which excites me. To be a CNCF Ambassador takes this love to the next level, being even more engaged within the cloud native space.

I started my career as a Linux system administrator. I have been into automation, long before Infra as Code was a thing. I saw Openstack and Kubernetes as an opportunity to take bigger steps in my career. Afterwards, Azure crossed my way too; and I have been doing projects at different clients with those technologies since then. After a long time working from home, because of the Covid pandemic, I have realized even more of the importance of meeting people face to face, and I have been attending more and more meetups since a few years ago. Last year (in 2024), I joined the team that organizes the Dutch Cloud Native Day and the Kubernetes Community Day in The Netherlands (I hope to see you at KCD Utrecht’25).

Orlin Vasilev aka Orlix is a Developer Expert and Open Source Technology Advocate at SAP’s CNFT for Project Gardener and NeoNephos. Also running the communities and maintainer for Project Harbor and K3s. CNCF Ambassador and driving the biggest Meetup Group +2000 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.

Oleg is a developer tools, community builder, DevRel and GTM consultant who helps companies to build technical ecosystems and partnerships. He is passionate about open-source software, open hardware, and cloud-native technologies. He started his open-source journey with OpenRISC and then Jenkins in 2012, where he became a core maintainer and served as a Cloud Native SIG co-leader and Governance Board member for 4 years. He is a Testcontainers Champion, WireMock contributor, and previously served as CDF TOC Chair. His cloud native work has included Cloud Native Jenkins, Keptn, OpenFeature, OpenTelemetry, CI/CD observability, and software delivery initiatives, including helping Keptn reach CNCF Incubation. In Switzerland, he co-founded Cloud Native Suisse Romande and co-organizes Silocon Chalet and KCD Suisse Romande.

Why am I excited to be a CNCF ambassador? The foundation brings together many of the projects, communities, and people shaping modern infrastructure and software delivery. For years, I have been a user, contributor, maintainer, speaker, mentor, and community organizer in cloud-native technologies. I serve on the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Program Committee, participate as a mentor in Merge Forward and Google Summer of Code, and support the observability and interoperability initiatives. I am excited to keep connecting projects and communities, helping new contributors get involved, and sharing cloud native technologies and practices through conferences, mentorship programs, meetups, and local communities.

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

Oluebube Princess, also Bube is a Devrel Engineer and an advocate for cloud-native technologies. She co-leads the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Abuja Chapter and is currently the Docs sub-lead for the Kubernetes v1.31 release. Her expertise lies in container orchestration with Kubernetes and technologies around orchestration.

Nitish has served as a Linux Foundation Mentee under the Kubernetes Release Engineering Team, where he built a Go library that is used by the Kubernetes project internally. Being passionate about Open Source, he has also contributed to various other projects including Kyverno, Okteto, etcd etc. Nitish has given various talks in the past around cloud-native, DevOps, and Security, one of which he led a panel discussion at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, 2023 in Chicago. He has also been featured on one of the Veam Podcast Show.

Nina is a principal software engineer working on multi-cluster Istio solutions and API Gateways at Solo.io. She has been on the release team for Kubernetes v1.27-v1.31, in roles including the Enhancements team lead and the Release Notes lead. Previously Nina worked at Shape Security preventing malicious automation attacks 🤖.

Niki Manoledaki is a senior software engineer, environmental sustainability advocate, keynote speaker, and community facilitator. Her work focuses on managing cloud resources efficiently as part of the platform engineering team at Grafana Labs and as a co-chair of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG’s Green Reviews Working Group.

I am a seasoned cloud-native professional with over 20 years of experience in the industry, specializing in Kubernetes, containerization, and DevOps practices. As the founder and organizer of the Bari and Matera CNCF Cloud-Native Meetup, I have fostered a strong local community committed to sharing knowledge and best practices. My technical expertise spans across multiple CNCF projects, including Prometheus, Envoy, and Helm. I regularly share my insights and experiences on my blog at www.tanzu.eu, where I explore emerging trends and innovative solutions in the cloud-native ecosystem. Passionate about continuous learning and collaboration, I am excited to contribute to the community as a CNCF Ambassador.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to be an Ambassador because it allows me to actively contribute to the growth and development of the cloud-native ecosystem, which I am truly passionate about. This role provides a unique platform to engage with a diverse and talented community, enabling the exchange of knowledge and ideas that drive innovation. Furthermore, being an Ambassador presents the opportunity to mentor and inspire others while learning from the collective experiences of fellow professionals. It is an honor to serve as a bridge between the CNCF and the broader community, fostering collaboration and mutual support.

Serial meetup organiser, including Cloud Native and Kubernetes Edinburgh, CNK Manchester, as well as larger events such as Kubernetes Community Days UK. Currently employed as Head of Engineering at Nscale, helping to build a next-generation managed Kubernetes service tailored for AI workloads. Passionate about new technology, but simultaneously romantic about the old with a penchant for decrepit Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems hardware. Sporadically blogs at https://dischord.org

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a CNCF Ambassador, I’m really excited about formalising the ability to build bridges across the CNCF ecosystem, helping communities collaborate and support each other in their Cloud Native journey. I look forward to being able to leverage the resources and support provided by the CNCF to bring the best to the community events that I’m a part of.

For most of his 10+ year career, Nao has been involved in the architecture, design, and engineering of open source systems, including the Linux kernel, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Hyperledger. Nao is currently working on cloud native and platform services. Nao had started the CNCF/Glossary Japanese translation projects and was one of the organizers of the Cloud Native Community Japan. https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-community-japan/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I look forward to energizing the technical/non-technical community in Japan and making connections with the global community.

Currently working as a Site Reliability Engineer, he contributes to the construction of Magalu Cloud, the Brazilian public cloud. He contributes to Kubernetes and other open source software. He transitioned his career from the education and telemarketing sectors to DevOps and Cloud Native, focusing on continuous improvement, agile software delivery, vulnerability correction and adoption of best practices for platform provisioning, configuration and maintenance. It promotes a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

I like hacking through software engineering problems. Over the past 3-4 years, I have been developing solutions for software reliability. I love everything around cloud-native, open source, and security. I have also founded Women in Cloud Native community for women who are interested in learning more about Cloud Native and those who are willing to learn, collaborate and support each other to grow Website – https://womenincloudnative.com/ Personal Blog – https://nancychauhan.in/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I look forward to contributing to the CNCF community as an ambassador and keep doing things I was doing before. Meeting other like-minded ambassadors and motivating each other to contribute, support, and inspire others excites me

I’m passionate about open-source and cloud-native technologies, particularly Kubernetes and serverless, and their intersection with Data & AI workloads. I authored multiple books about Kubernetes over the years with the intention to help learners skill up on Kubernetes and find a new career path. I’m proud and excited to be a CNCF ambassador! Being an ambassador allows me to connect more with the community. I would love to share knowledge and learn, and I hope to help others learn about cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and how Kubernetes serves as the backbone in the age of AI. I will continue to create engaging educational content to help people navigate the complexities of Kubernetes adoption more effectively. I am sharing tech educational content on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CloudMelonVis and on my blog: https://cvisiona.com. And last but not least my favorite Github : https://github.com/cloudmelon, I’m happy to connect!

Nabarun is a Principal Engineer at Broadcom, where he builds scalable Kubernetes distributions and control planes. He is a maintainer of the Kubernetes project, a Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience chair, a Kubernetes Release Manager and a Technical Lead of CNCF TAG Operational Resilience. He is an emeritus member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee and the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee. Nabarun has been the Kubernetes 1.21 Release Team Lead and has been an active member of 8 releases since 2019. Nabarun continuously mentors newcomers in the community through various means. Outside the cloud native ecosystem, he chaired PyCon India 2025 and co-chaired PyCon India 2024. He has been featured multiple times in the Times of India and other publications for his work in the Kubernetes and Python communities. Nabarun has spoken at multiple KubeCon events in the past, as well as other CloudNative-focused conferences like Kubernetes Community Days.

Márk is a SWE/SRE from Hungary with years of experience in various Cloud Native technologies as well as contributing to and maintaining Open Source Software. He is one of the core maintainers of Dex, a Cloud Native identity federation solution and a number of Go libraries (Viper being the most prominent among them). Márk also organizes several tech meetups in Hungary (Go Budapest, Kubernetes and Cloud Native Budapest, Microservices Budapest) and regularly appears as a speaker in the region at meetups, workshops, conferences and podcasts. You can occasionally find him posting to his blog (https://sagikazarmark.hu/), but chances are his GitHub profile is more interesting. In his free time, Márk likes riding a bicycle, reading books, but his favorite hobby for more than 20 years has been Hungarian folk dance.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I always liked learning/building new technologies and then sharing the knowledge with others. By working on various Open Source projects for more than a decade I also learned to appreciate the opportunity to learn from people coming from different backgrounds. By being an ambassador I hope that I’ll have more opportunities to connect with people, learn from them and maybe share some of my knowledge as well.

Monika Rajput is a community builder and startup enthusiast passionate about cloud-native tech, open-source projects, and product development. With a knack for connecting innovators, she organizes CNCF events and champions collaborative spaces that foster knowledge-sharing and growth. Monika is especially drawn to the startup world, where she focuses on creating impactful products that drive meaningful change. Her work is all about bringing people together to push the boundaries of what technology and community can achieve. links: https://community.cncf.io/cloud-native-gurugram/

Mohammad Reza is a Senior Software Engineer at DoiT International with multiple years of experience in DevOps and Software Engineering. He actively contributes to the Kubernetes as part of the Release Team and has published multiple research papers and his PhD thesis on cloud-native technologies, particularly service meshes such as Istio and Cilium. He is writing about Cloud-Native technologies on his LinkedIn page and his personal blog. You can also find his previous talks in various venues on his Youtube channel.

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.

Miley has extensive experience in DevRel and has worked on the WasmEdge project for over 3 years from its very start. She implements strategies to nurture developer communities, explores content marketing, and engages with devs on the WasmEdge repo to maintain an active/ responsive presence on GitHub. She hosts tech meetups and conferences online and in-person, including OpenSource Fairs, WebAssembly Meetups and Rust language meetups and conferences. Check out the videos of WasmEdge’s most recent meetups in Silicon Valley and Singapore: https://github.com/second-state/meetups

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to be a CNCF ambassador because I am passionate about running cloud-native technologies workshops and communities and contributing to the ecosystem’s growth. Working closely with a supportive community enables me to learn from the experiences of others and share valuable insights. Moreover, being an ambassador provides an excellent platform for WasmEdge to engage with other projects and stay up-to-date on the latest cloud-native advancements. I can not wait to connect with other ambassadors

I’m Michel Murabito, but everyone calls me Mich. I’m a Tech Evangelist at Fractal Cloud with over 20 years of experience in software development. Throughout my career, I’ve held various roles in tech companies, enhancing my skills and contributing to numerous projects that have shaped my expertise. My areas of interest include Sustainability, Platform Engineering and Cloud Native technologies in general, which have guided my career choices and contributions I actively contribute to the CNCF, participating in the Sustainability TAG and the Platform WG of the APP Delivery TAG, and I organize Cloud Native Days Italy, a key event for the Kubernetes community in Italy. I founded DevelopersLife, an Italian community of 800 members dedicated to supporting developers, both new and experienced, by providing them with the resources and guidance needed to maximize their professional opportunities in the development sector.

Michael Levan is a seasoned engineer and consultant in the Kubernetes and Platform Engineering space who spends his time working with startups and enterprises around the globe on consulting, training, and content creation. He is a trainer, 3x published author, podcast host, international public speaker, and was part of the Kubernetes v1.28 Release Team.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The avenue that’s now opened to work with more people around the world. I’ve been giving back to the community, creating free content, and contributing to projects for 5+ years. I’m now excited to work with others who are passionate about doing the same.

I’m a Solution Architect at F5 by day, and I organize the Boston Kubernetes Meetup. I enjoy helping customers solve K8s challenges, usually around networking and security. I’m a dad of 2 fantastic boys and I blog at https://michaeloleary.net

I’m an active maintainer to kubernetes, Istio, OTel, and more website, a speaker in KubeCon and KCD, and a frequent member of KubeCon Program Committee. I own a technical website about cloud native and AI, and write those content in https://docs.daocloud.io/en/

Michael Foster serves as the Community Lead for the open-source StackRox project and as a Senior Principal Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat, based in Toronto. With a background in containers and Kubernetes adoption for large enterprises, he currently focuses on upskilling security teams to better utilize Kubernetes information for SOC teams. Michael played a pivotal role in creating the Cloud Native Glossary initiative and is an active organizer of CNCF Toronto Meetups. In his free time, he enjoys staying active through skiing, exploring Toronto’s on his motorcycle, and tinkering with mechanical projects at home.

Arif is a Cloud, Platform, Cybersecurity, and AI Architect with over two decade of experience in telecom and cloud-native transformation. He is a passionate advocate for open source and community-driven innovation. As a community leader, Arif co-organizes community activity with Kubernetes User Group Bangladesh (K8SUGBD) and Cloud Native Rajshahi, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing across the region.

Maxime Coquerel is a Principal Cloud Security Architect driving cloud threat research, cloud security architecture, threat model and risk assessments across enterprise-scale designs. Passionate about knowledge sharing, he collaborates with cloud vendors and emerging startups to co-develop innovative cloud security solutions, while actively contributing to the global cloud-native community through mentoring, blogging, and community events to inspire secure and scalable adoption of CNCF technologies.

Max Körbächer is the Founder and Chief Technology Advisor at Liquid Reply. He is serving as a CNCF Ambassador & GB Member, a member of the Linux Foundation Europe Advisory Board, Agentic AI Foundation Ambassador and Founder and Emeritus Lead of the former CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

Max focuses on platform engineering to simplify the current challenges of complex sovereign systems in AI and cloud native space. He is the author of the book Platform Engineering for Architects. Max is also a dedicated community leader, notably organizing the Cloud Native Days (formerly KCD) in Munich & Ukraine, and the Kubernetes & Cloud Native Meetup in Munich.

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’m a Plaform Engineer and help developers to focus on features delivery based on robust infrastrucure. I am passionate by Kubernetes and all the ecosystem around. I contribute to meshery, jaegertracing, score-spec, and more, and I am a Meshery maintainer.

Mauro is a Staff Engineer at Spectro Cloud focused on the operating system layer — building foundations that let Kubernetes environments run securely, predictably, and with minimal operational friction. He’s part of the maintainer team for Kairos, a CNCF Sandbox project for immutable, edge-focused cloud native operating systems.

He co-hosts Cloud Native Community Brussels and serves on TAG Workloads Foundation. As an ambassador he’s focused on connecting local builders, mentoring new contributors, and sharing real-world production insights from the OS layer up.

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.

Matteo is a seasoned Software and Cloud Engineer but also a former startup CTO, DevRel and Solution Architect. Hacker and builder, advocating for Cloud Native technologies around the world as active member of the Cloud Native community. Matteo is a Kubernetes Release Team Member and active contributor who loves Platform Engineering. Co-organizer of KCD Netherlands and CNGC Netherlands meetups, helping out different KCDs and founding organizer of Cloud Native Days. @mbianchidev on (almost) every social media.

I strongly believe Kubernetes is an awesome platform not only for cloud-native, app orchestration and workload, but especially for MLOps (Kubeflow) and in Containerization: not only for runnable images but also for broad OCI packaging and distribution (ORAS/Podman/Buildah) especially in relation to ML model assets and integration with signature, attestation. I contribute to Kubeflow, Oras, and other Open Source projects. I’m a co-organizer of the local JUG (JVM User Group) Milano, and I’m active in other Italian communities, often contributing my passion/hobby of live streaming and video recording.

Matthias is the Director of PolarSignals Cloud. He maintains Prometheus, the Prometheus Operator, Parca, Pyrra, and more. He is an emeritus Thanos maintainer. He organized PromCon (the Prometheus conference) in 2023 and 2024. He runs the Berlin Prometheus MeetUp.

I’m passionate about Cloud Native Computing technologies driven by Cloud, Security, Kubernetes and Platform Engineering. I’m one of the co-organizers of the CNCF&K8s Meetup in Quebec city (Canada). You will find some of my learnings in my personal blog: https://mathieu-benoit.github.io/ and in my Medium space: https://medium.com/@mabenoit.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being a Cloud Native Ambassador will allow me to be closer to the CNCF community, and be connected to more mentors to grow my knowledge and as an individual too. It will also allow me to find more tips to promote content related to CNCF projects, and hopefully I will be able to help and inspire others to be more involved in this community.

Masaya Aoyama is a Technical Lead for Platform Engineering at CyberAgent and Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2025.

He also serves as a Technical Advisor to 3-shake, Inc. and CREATIONLINE, Inc., both of which are CNCF member companies.

Since 2017, he has been an active leader in Japan’s cloud native community, organizing numerous conferences and meetups across the country. Notably, he has served as Co-Chair of CloudNative Days, Japan’s largest cloud native conference series, for over eight years.

As a Co-Founder and board member of the CNCF Japan Chapter (CNCJ: Cloud Native Community Japan), he continues to foster the growth of the local cloud native ecosystem.

He is also the author of Kubernetes Perfect Guide, widely regarded as one of the most popular Kubernetes books in Japan.

Maryam Tavakkoli is a senior Cloud engineer at RELEX Solutions, specializing in the design and implementation of Cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure. She is also one of the organizers of the CNCF meetups in Finland. With a strong passion for open-source cloud-native solutions, Maryam actively engages in collaborative efforts and idea-sharing within this domain.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve had the fortune to learn from world-class cloud native leaders, and I want to pay it forward by organizing, speaking at and participating in cloud native events. In addition, I’m excited to make the cloud native concepts more tangible through my research.

Marvin is a Cloud Software Engineer at ClickHouse and maintainer for the kcp project. He started out as a Linux sysadmin, and found himself gradually turning into a software engineer while automating Kubernetes cluster operations. He has been working with Kubernetes in various roles since 2018.

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.

Marko is a Senior Software Engineer at Kubermatic working on development of open source platforms for managing Kubernetes clusters on scale. He’s a Subproject Lead for Kubernetes Release Engineering, and a long time Kubernetes contributor, mainly active in Release and Infrastructure areas. Marko is also a Teaching Associate at School of Computing, University Union in Belgrade, Serbia, where he’s teaching Kubernetes and the Cloud Native technologies to the final year students.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: First of all, I’m thrilled to work with and learn from our very experienced community members. I hope to use this opportunity to share my knowledge, as a long time Kubernetes contributor and Teaching Associate focused at Cloud Native Technologies, with the broader community and make contributing to the Cloud Native ecosystem easier and more appealing. I also hope to provide support to the CNCF projects to attract and retain contributors via different initiatives and mechanisms.

Marcus is a platform engineer and his main area of focus in recent years has been around CI/CD, Go, Kubernetes, containers and DevOps but originally started out as a web developer and JavaScript enthusiast. A self-described “tinkerer”, when not building Kubernetes solutions, Marcus likes to dabble with 3D printing and experimenting with smart home tech. He can be found blogging online at www.MarcusNoble.co.uk and giving talks at meetups & conferences.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am excited to leverage the support of the CNCF to better help others within out community through shared knowledge and experience. I’m excited for the opportunity to meet more amazing people in the cloud native space and learn from their experiences and expertise.

Marino Wijay is a Canadian, Traveller, International Speaker, Open Source Advocate for Service Mesh, CNI, Kubernetes, and Networking. He is an Ambassador @ Civo Cloud, and Lead Organizer for KubeHuddle Toronto. He is passionate about technology and modern distributed systems. He will always fall back to the patterns of Networking and the ways of the OSI. Community building is his driving force; A modern Jedi Academy.

Mario is from a small village in Germany and working for Kubermatic. He studied creative media at an English university and moved his field of knowledge to Cloud Native Infrastructure. He is working as a Customer Delivery Architect with the focus on planning and building concepts and architecture for Infrastructure in the cloud native world. Furthermore, he started the Google Developer Group for Cloud in Munich back in 2016. His passion is always to move the cloud native community one step forward. He is part of the Kubernetes SIG ContribEx and helps in the SIG K8s Infra with reporting.

Marcel Kerker (July 12, 1967),leveraging 32 years of experience in IT and secondment, I have spent the last 8 years specializing in Kubernetes. As a part-time event manager, I merge my passion for technology with strong organizational skills, organizing meetups focused on containerization and related cloud native technologies to bridge the gap between technical expertise and community building. Since 2022, I have been a core organizer for my local community. My contributions also extend to the broader ecosystem, where I am actively involved with several Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs), Dutch Cloud Native Days, and the CNCF TAG for Environmental Sustainability. I am also the founder and board member of “Stichting Cloud Native Netherlands”, with promoting Open Source software and Cloud native technology in the Netherlands by organizing events and activities around these technologies. Sharing knowledge and building a strong community around the CNCF ecosystem is always a key motivator for me. That is why, I’m became a CNCF Ambassador and leveraging the power of that role.

Strategic and results-driven GCP Architect with 6+ years of specialized experience in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), complemented by a total of 15+ years in the IT industry. Proven expertise in designing and implementing robust cloud solutions. Passionate about knowledge sharing and actively contributes to the cloud community through workshops, mentorship, and content creation. As an organizer of the Cloud Native Chennai community for the past 4 years, I have led numerous initiatives, fostering a vibrant and collaborative community. Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manikandank276/

I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer and a maintainer of Kubernetes and Knative. I’m working on improving the cloud infrastructure of the Kubernetes project for our contributors and end-users. I’m also a member of the Kubestronaut program.

Open source enthusiast, Senior DevOps Engineer with experience in implementing CNCF projects/tools including Kubernetes, Argo, etc. and an active community organizer in Kuala Lumpur

Senior Software Engineer at GitHub Actions, passionate about developer and infrastructure tools, distributed systems, systems- and network-programming, sharing knowledge. My expertise primarily revolves around Go, Kubernetes, serverless architectures and the Cloud Native domain in general. Off-hours: photography, cycling, kamados, cats.

Lori has a passion and enthusiasm for working with the developer and open source community. She is a CNCF Ambassador, former CNCF Marketing Committee Chair, former Chair of the CDF Outreach Marketing Committee, program chair of cdCon 2023, and is active in the OpenSSF devrel committee. She co-hosts the CD Pipeline on behalf of the CDF with TechstrongTV. She is committed to helping open source and other tech communities grow and adapt in our ever changing environment. She is currently Head of Community for Percona.

Lucas is a Kubernetes and cloud native contributor since 10+ years. He is and has been a CNCF Ambassador for over 7 years, and was awarded Top CNCF Ambassador 2017 with Sarah Novotny. Lucas is a Cedar Policy maintainer, contributes to Kubernetes SIG Auth, and works on control plane access control as a Staff Software Engineer at Upbound. Lucas is running meetups and KCD Helsinki in Finland, and has spoken at 10+ KubeCons. Previously, Lucas was a co-lead for SIG Cluster Lifecycle, co-created kubeadm, and ported Kubernetes to ARM.

Lisa is a developer advocate and community architect, and is Head of Developer Relations at Intuit (home of Argo Proj). Lisa is also a CNCF Ambassador and Silicon Valley Cloud Native User Group organizer (with over 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! 🙂

With over a decade of experience working on production, large-scale systems, serving million of users, Lior specializes in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering principles. He has vast experience working with Kubernetes and contributing to the ecosystem, both as a user and a cloud provider. Lior has also been leading Kubernetes networking efforts and is a key contributor to Gateway API. Alongside his technical work, Lior mentors startups and development teams worldwide, providing them advice in R&D growth, platform scalability, cloud deployments and cost efficiency.

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, also serving as a CNCF TOC member and ambassador. She has been actively involved with the Istio service mesh since its inception in 2017, holding positions on both the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Prior to her current role, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book “Istio Ambient Explained” and has more than 200 patents to her name.

Hey, my name is Leonard Pahlke, and I am a software engineer with a focus on cloud, open source and sustainability. I like to build systems that tend to get big and complex. I post regularly on the CNCF blog and my own website lvsp.io. I am a CNCF Ambassador, Chair for the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability, lead the Kubernetes release team for v1.26 and organize meetups in Hamburg.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love the cloud and the infinite variety and complexity of systems that can be built on it. The CNCF truly makes cloud-native applications accessible to anyone and any platform. The open source spirit fascinates and inspires me. Serving as a ambassador the community is a great honor.

I’m a technical support engineer, currently I mostly have varied interests ranging from Hardware to K8s and VM’s Blogs I’ve written are at https://dev.to/mediocreDevops

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: This is a quite new thing to me so I’m taking it all in, hoping I can get some guidance on how this whole thing works, but I’m excited to be a part of this and give back to the community

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.

Kristina Devochko is a platform engineer, tech content creator, speaker and tech community contributor based in Norway. She focuses on all things cloud native, open source and green tech. Kristina is an owner of kristhecodingunicorn.com tech blog, a CNCF Ambassador, Green Software Champion, host of Platform & Cloud Café podcast, co-organizer of multiple meetup groups and mentor. In her free time Kristina enjoys working on her homelab, reading and cuddling with her four cats.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love giving back to the tech community and I hope that my actions and contributions can inspire others to create software with sustainability, security and cloud native principles in mind. Another important goal for me is to contribute to even stronger diversity, equality and inclusion in the cloud native space by creating a non-judgemental, open, safe and welcoming space for everyone. By being an ambassador I can focus even more on doing just that! I’m also very excited to meet all the fantastic ambassadors and members of the cloud native community and collaborate on making a positive impact in the CNCF space together 🙂

Kohei Ota is a Senior Field Engineer at Apple. He is a CNCF Ambassador and contributes to Kubernetes SIG Docs as the Japanese localization owner in the CNCF communities. He also organizes Docker Meetup Tokyo and CloudNative Days Tokyo; some of the biggest “container/cloud native” communities and conferences in Japan.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been involved with local cloud native community based in Japan. Unfortunately not many folks from Japan have tightened relationship with international community. I’m excited to be part of organizers of both sides and would love to help local experts become part of the international community!

He works at Kubermatic as a Kubernetes Consultant and Trainer to help companies with their cloud-native journey. Before that, he worked for startup and enterprise companies in the advertising, banking, and telecom industries as SysAdmin, Application Admin, DevOps Engineer, and SRE for more than 20 years.

I work as a SRE with SEKAI (swiss based startup) prior to joining SEKAI I worked as a Solution Architect with AWS where I worked with startups on several ways of building on AWS. I spend most of my time working across containers, but my philosophy revolves more about buidling cheaply and reliably. I have written several blogs which revolves around this in some way such as, https://thenewstack.io/how-to-run-databases-in-kubernetes/ https://medium.com/@kollzey69/balancing-innovation-and-cost-in-the-cloud-era-rethinking-best-practices-and-the-role-of-3264677ff726 https://techcabal.com/2024/07/29/strategic-tech-choices-a-cost-centric-philosophy-for-ctos/

Kevin Evans is a Senior Technical Specialist at Microsoft, focusing on Azure solutions with over 25 years of experience in the technology sector. He is the founder of the Code to Cloud community, dedicated to advancing cloud-native practices in Western Canada. As a recognized thought leader, Kevin also serves as the chapter lead for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in Calgary, Alberta. Where he actively supports the cloud community. Through his expertise in architecture and technical engineering, he is committed to empowering businesses with secure, scalable cloud solutions. Kevin also hosts the Code to Cloud podcast, sharing insights and fostering knowledge sharing across the cloud technology space. Website: codetocloud.io

Khanh is maintainer of the PipeCD project. He is currently employed at CyberAgent Inc, and responsible for the CI/CD system across the organization. As a member of the productivity development team, he is interested in anything that improves development and operations processes, especially cloud-native topics. He is also an organizer at the Cloud Native Community Hanoi, Vietnam.

An experienced DevOps Engineer with a solid background spanning over 5 years, specializing in CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) technologies. I’ve excelled in developing and implementing robust infrastructures for seamless application deployment, with a focus on optimizing availability through industry best practices. Additionally, actively contribute to the CNCF community by organizing significant events like KCD Sri Lanka 2022, KCD Sri Lanka 2023, and hosting monthly Kubernetes Sri Lanka live streams on YouTube, fostering knowledge sharing and keeping professionals updated with the latest advancements in cloud-native technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Each ambassador may have their unique reasons for their excitement, but the chance to influence, connect, contribute, and learn often serves as significant driving forces behind their enthusiasm for taking on this role.

Kensei Nakada is a software engineer, passionate about CloudNative tech. He’s a long-time Kubernetes contributor, mainly focusing on the scheduler as a SIG-Scheduling approver, and has led many major enhancements.

Karen Chu is an Apple OSPO PM focused on Swift language community initiatives. 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.

I am Kaiwalya Koparkar, a Developer Advocate, and open-source evangelist from India. I founded the Cloud Native Nashik community, hold KCNA, CKA, CKAD certifications, and create educational content to help developers and students learn CNCF tools and cloud-native technologies.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of OllyGarden, where I build tools that help teams understand telemetry quality, control observability costs, and improve instrumentation. I’m a Governance Committee member for the OpenTelemetry project and an emeritus maintainer of the OpenTelemetry Collector and Jaeger. I also started and maintained several open source projects, including the Jaeger Operator, the OpenTelemetry Operator, the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder, and the load-balancing exporter.

I enjoy sharing practical knowledge about observability and distributed tracing. I have spoken at KubeCon Europe and North America, Open Source Summit, FOSDEM, Devoxx Belgium, and several DevOpsDays events. I’m also a co-founder and instructor at Telemetry Drops, an OpenTelemetry training program for engineers and teams.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: My mission is to help you and your agents have telemetry you can trust. As a CNCF Ambassador, I want to help practitioners improve telemetry quality, build reliable observability pipelines, and make better decisions about the systems they operate.

He is passionate about cloud native technologies, especially Kubernetes, and is a professional in this field. He leads the localization of Kubernetes and CNCF documentation as a localization approver in SIG-Docs and a reviewer for several projects. Additionally, he is an active OSS contributor to Kubernetes and related projects. To encourage more people to join the community, he is part of the organizer team for Kubernetes Upstream Training. (Related blog post: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2024/10/28/k8s-upstream-training-japan-spotlight/ )

Julia is passionate about helping teams build reliable, observable, and scalable systems. At Dash0, she focuses on bridging the gap between technology and people, enabling organizations to understand their systems better and make data-driven decisions with confidence. Beyond her work, Julia is a CNCF Ambassador, AWS Container Hero, Docker Captain, Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, and Girl Code Ambassador. She’s an active community leader who helps organize Kubernetes Community Days New York, AWS Community Day New York, and the CNCF Midtown Meetup NYC, creating spaces where technologists can connect, learn, and grow together.

Juliano Costa is a Developer Advocate at Datadog with a focus on OpenTelemetry. He is passionate about fostering the Cloud Native community and spreading OTel’s word everywhere he goes. Juliano is an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry project and a maintainer on the OpenTelemetry Demo and Developer Experience SIG. When he’s not talking about OTel, you’ll find him chasing after his energetic 3-year-old son.

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!

I’m Joseph Sandoval, a Principal Product Manager at Adobe, where I lead product strategy for our internal developer platform. I’ve been in tech for over 25 years, working across large-scale infrastructure, DevOps, and site reliability engineering. I became an early Kubernetes end user back in 2013, before the 1.0 release, and I’ve been passionate ever since about helping others adopt and succeed with cloud native technologies.

I currently serve as co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Board and as a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair for Atlanta 2025. Before that, I was part of the Kubernetes SIG Release team. These days, my focus is on AI and machine learning workloads and building agentic experiences both on our platform and for Adobe’s users. You’ll often find me at CNCF and AI/ML community events in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I love connecting with practitioners, sharing what I’ve learned, and supporting others in their cloud native journey.

I began my IT career as a Linux SysAdmin specializing in deployment. In 2015, everything changed when I discovered Docker, igniting my passion for containerization. I learned Kubernetes and passed the CKA certification in 2020. Currently, I’m an enthusiast of Cilium CNI, have collaborated on the Cilium certification (CCA) and i created an OpenTofu provider for deploying Cilium in Kubernetes. I’m also a Kubestronaut. My blog: https://medium.com/@littel.jo My credly: https://www.credly.com/users/joseph-ligier

I have been working around software development for more than 6 years. Involving development, infrastructure architecture, monitoring, etc. Currently, I work as SRE at SCRM Lidl International Hub. Also, I have been awarded with Microsoft MVP for 4 years in a row and nowadays, I invest the majority of my free time contributing to KEDA. I’m proud about my puppies and my wife, and I use the rest of the time with them.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The program provides a platform for ambassadors to connect and collaborate with other cloud-native enthusiasts and promote the adoption of cloud-native practices. By becoming a CNCF ambassador, one can contribute to the open-source community and help shape the future of cloud-native computing.