Ambassadors

Ayrat (Archy) is a CNCF Ambassador, Cloud Native Tech Professor at Mcgill University and Cloud Native Architect at Google Cloud. As a CNCF Ambassador he has an opportunity to educate people and share knowledge about benefits of Cloud Native ecosystem via CNCF and Kubernetes Meetups, workshops or by helping customers to build modern cloud native applications that can run seamlessly on-prem or any cloud provider. Archy is passionate about community, he is a Founder and lead organizer of Canadian CNCF Meetups (Virtual, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Waterloo, Halifax) and frequent speaker GDG, CNCF Meetups and CNCF related conferences. He is an organizer of Canadian Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs), Cloud Native Days Canada 2019 and GDG Cloud & AI DevFest 2019.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: To be part of amazing team of Ambassadors provides you opportunity to learn from other experts and meet new friends across the world who is passionate about same technology. Being Ambassador also gives you a life time opportunity to meet and learn with Cloud Native Community at Kubecons. Give back to community by organizing K8s Meetups, KCDs and sharing the knowledge with wider community.

Batuhan Apaydın a.k.a. developer-guy has been very active in the Software Supply Chain Security space. He is eager to learn more about it in all aspects because he knows this topic will become one of the utmost critical topics that everybody has to be concerned about. Towards that direction, he won the “Best Sigstore Evangelist” award and wrote a blog post about it to encourage to the next one and took an active role in the first-ever SigstoreCon by being one of the Program Committee members of the event and created a Twitter Community about Software Supply Chain Security and that community is now about 500+ people joined. He is also selected as Docker Captain Program 2023. In addition to that he is also a CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Ambassador 2023. He also tries to be active in Turkey by organizing in-person, and virtual meetups, and workshops. He is the organizer of two important organizations in Turkey named DevOpsTr, CNCF Istanbul Chapter, and Cloud Native Turkiye. He is also one of the organizers of the KCD Turkey. He is also an active contributor to several CNCF projects including Ko, Flux, and Kyverno. He also enjoys writing technical blog posts and wrote 10+ blog posts and all of which are published on important official websites including Kyverno, CD Foundation, Flux, Sigstore, etc. • https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/10/18/tekton-chains/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/10/prove-the-authenticity-of-oci-artifacts/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/08/manage-kyverno-policies-as-ocirepositories/ • https://fluxcd.io/blog/2022/11/verify-the-integrity-of-the-helm-charts-stored-as-oci-artifacts-before-reconciling-them-with-flux/ • https://kubesimplify.com/the-secret-gems-behind-building-container-images-enter-buildkit-and-docker-buildx • https://blog.kubesimplify.com/getting-started-with-ko-a-fast-container-image-builder-for-your-go-applications • https://nirmata.com/securing_base_images/ • https://blog.sigstore.dev/how-to-verify-container-images-with-kyverno-using-kms-cosign-and-workload-identity-1e07d2b85061

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: First of all, I’m the first person from Turkey who has been selected as a CNCF Ambassador which is super great for me because I have the energy to spread all my knowledge with other people and I do really like to collaborate with people by organizing in-person, virtual meetups. I thought that I can waste my time and energy by becoming a CNCF Ambassador still continue organizing meetups and sharing knowledge because Turkiye has great potential of using CNCF projects to solve problems.

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!

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.

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 Cloud Native and Platform Engineering at EscherCloudAI, helping to build a next-generation managed Kubernetes service tailored for AI workloads backed by a sustainable approach to running infrastructure. 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.

Known as the Corsair and a massive Windows fan in the Cloud Native community, he set his mission to help running the amazing Cloud Native projects on WSL2 and create “technologically inclusive” blogs at https://wsl.dev. He’s also a Tech Writer for SUSE where he contributes to the man OpenSource projects, such as Kubewarden, Epinio, Elemental, Rancher Desktop. His principal traits are that he has 4 cats at home (read: a lot of patience) and provides Swiss chocolate during events (read: community oriented)

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The most important point and motivation is the community! To be able to meet persons from different backgrounds and still share a same passion for Cloud Native ecosystem. And as a “rare” Windows fan in Cloud Native, one of my personal goals is to bring more docs/blogs/talks in running projects on WSL2 and make it even more inclusive for the million of Windows users around the world.

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’m Ramesh Kumar, a passionate advocate of cloud-native technologies and a dedicated mentor. I am the founder and organizer of the CNCF/Kubernetes Sacramento Meetup and CNCF/Kubernetes Penang Meetup, where I empower and support over 500 students in obtaining Kubernetes certifications, helping them enhance their lives and careers. My specialties lie in mentoring, teaching, and training, and I take pride in my ability to inspire and guide others in their learning journey. Through my meetups and expertise in CNCF technologies, I strive to build a more inclusive and innovative tech community, one act of kindness at a time. I also maintain a blog where I share my knowledge and insights with the broader tech community.