Ambassadors

Ana Margarita Medina is a Staff Developer Advocate at Lightstep, where she speaks on all things SRE, DevOps, and Reliability, and is a podcast host for On-Call Me, Maybe (oncallmemaybe.com). She is a self-taught engineer with over 12 years of experience, focusing on cloud infrastructure and reliability in the last few. She is also part of the Kubernetes Release Team (v1.25 – v1.27) and has been advising CNCF’s Keptn (keptn.sh) project since 2019. When time permits her, she leads efforts to dispel the stigma surrounding mental health and bring more Black and Latinx folks into tech.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I want to continue giving back to the CNCF community, I see this as another great opportunity to connect with other developers (open source and end users) and learn about their struggles with current tooling to help shape where this industry moves toward. I’m also very excited to empower others to see that they too belong in tech, that there is space for them to work in cloud-native, and become open-source contributors, and for folks to join in and help us grow this community and build responsible tech.

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

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

Been working in software since 1998 and from the early days was drawn to performance engineering, observability and more recently on DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering. I am an active contributor to the CNCF project Keptn, I am a podcaster, I create YouTube tutorials and occasionally blog as well! Besides IT I am passionate about salsa dancing 🙂

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The success of any community depends on the people that actively drive community activities (bringing people together, educating, making them feel comfortable ..) and the members of the community that then want to join, grow and eventually contribute back to that community. I am excited to get the chance to help grow the community with my goal to inspire many others to do the same

I’m contributor and maintainer of KubeArmor (A CNCF runtime security project). I’m interested in Kubernetes Security. You can read my blogs here https://kranurag.dev

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be a CNCF ambassador because I’ll try to bring and educate more people towards CNCF ecosystem. CNCF is one of the most welcoming community. I also want to share my knowledge when it comes to Kubernetes and other CNCF projects to new peoples who’re getting started. Finally, I would love to meet and connect with fellow CNCF 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.

Emin is working as a Solutions Architect and has undertaken tasks such as producing solutions related to Kubernetes, Cloud technologies and Cloud Native Transformation in general, and transferring best practices about these areas. He is part of the AWS Community Builder Program within the Containers category and he is part of the HashiCorp Ambassador Program within the Open Source community. He is part of the organiser team of the official CNCF Istanbul Community Chapter (https://community.cncf.io/istanbul/). He publishes blog posts from his personal Medium page (https://medium.com/@eminalemdar) and also participates in Open Source and Cloud Native related conferences and delivers talks about these technologies. He is in the organiser team of Kubernetes Community Days Turkiye conference.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Community activities have always been my biggest motivation throughout my career. Helping people and learning from the people by participating in community activities is extremely important for me. Cloud Native Community is really one of a kind and being part of this community is really like a dream coming true for me.

Kunal is empowering communities via open-source and education. He finds passion in teaching and has taught thousands of folks online and in person. He is a developer relations manager at Civo, CNCF Ambassador, TEDx speaker and a GitHub Star. He is the founder of WeMakeDevs and also started the official Cloud Native Student Community group joined by thousands of folks, focussed on getting more young people involved in the ecosystem. In the past he has been a track chair of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Major League Hacking Coach and a Google Summer of Code mentor with Red Hat. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/KunalKushwaha Blog: https://blog.wemakedevs.org Community: https://wemakedevs.org

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am a strong believer in the importance of diversity and inclusion, particularly in the field of cloud native technology. My goal has always been to facilitate the learning and onboarding process for individuals interested in this ecosystem. Therefore, I believe that becoming a CNCF Ambassador would be a significant step towards achieving this objective.

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

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

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.

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

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