Ambassadors

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

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

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

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

Adriana Villela is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Lightstep. She helps companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability, SRE, & DevOps practices. Before Lightstep, she managed a Platform Engineering team & an Observability Practices team at Tucows. Adriana has worked at various large-scale enterprises, as an individual contributor and leader, including Bank of Montreal, Ceridian, and Accenture. Adriana has a popular technical blog on Medium (https://adri-v.medium.com), is co-host of the On-Call Me Maybe Podcast (oncallmemaybe.com), and is a HashiCorp Ambassador.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Having spent a chunk of my time in the last 10 months working with OpenTelemetry, I’m excited to use my ambassadorship to amplify my voice to promote and generate excitement about OpenTelemetry to the tech community at large. At the same time, I love digging into other CNCF projects like Kubernetes and ArgoCD, and I am looking forward to using my voice to help spread knowledge and excitement for those projects as well!

Community leader and CNCF ambassador, Alessandro has spent the last few years building cloud native infrastructures for Microsoft customers, animating the Dutch community, and training others to pass the CKx exams. He has passion for all things cloud native, he’s been around open source for 25 years and recently founded a startup that offers innovative Namespaces-as-a-service for developers. Twitter handle: @bongo

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Because I was before and it was awesome!

I am an engineering director for Kubernetes at Canonical. I participate in opensource as a Governing board member for Keptn and a founder of the Open Feature project. When I fancy taking to the camera I also run a youtube channel for advocating learning for senior engineers https://www.youtube.com/c/CloudNativeSkunkworks/featured

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I believe the ambassador programme is perfectly timed to come out of hibernation as people yearn for more day-to-day information on the CNCF and where to get started. I’ve been here a while now and I am happy to help be that guide on their cloud-native journey.

I am a Brazilian software engineer with focus on Cloud Native and Free and Open-Source Software and have been contributing to the Kubernetes community since 2020 mainly on SIG-Network and SIG-Windows initiatives. My writings and notes can be find here: http://opssec.in/.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Is a great honor to have the opportunity on collaborate and increase the community, I am very excited to be part and advocate in favor of this big community.

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

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

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am thrilled to be joining the CNCF Ambassador program. As someone who is deeply passionate about building and promoting fundamental technologies, particularly in the realm of Cloud Native solutions, I feel grateful for the opportunity to deepen my connections with the community and share my knowledge and experience with open-source users around the globe. By being part of this program, I hope to make a broader impact and bring even more value to Linux Foundation and CNCF. Additionally, I am eager to learn more about the needs of users and help them understand how they can effectively use cloud native and container technology to solve their problems.

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.

I’m a tester turned developer advocate. I work on & talk about Cloud native, Kubernetes & DevOps. I also create content – blog posts, Twitter threads – & host Twitter spaces. In addition, I’m one of the organiser of CNCF Hyderabad and strongly believe in collaborative learning and growth. When I am not working, I’m a food & travel blogger & love exploring eateries & going on road trips. You can find me at @TheTechMaharaj on Twitter.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am absolutely stoked to be a CNCF ambassador! Being a part of this community means I get to geek out with a group of like-minded individuals who are passionate about Cloud native technologies, Kubernetes, and DevOps. It’s an opportunity to keep learning and growing, while also sharing my knowledge and enthusiasm with people in Hyderabad. I’m excited to dive headfirst into the latest trends and developments, all while having a blast! I can’t wait to host fun events, share cool content, and help spread the word about CNCF and related technologies. Overall, this is not just a chance to contribute to a thriving ecosystem, but to also make connections, learn new things, and have a ton of fun along the way!

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

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

Barun likes hacking on low level stuff and fiddling around developer toolings. He maintains KubeArmor, a CNCF Sandbox project and currently works as a Software Engineer at Accuknox. He loves to talk about Open Source and has been associated with programs like Google Summer of Code and LFX Mentorship. Find his blogs at https://barun.cc

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Becoming a CNCF Ambassador has heightened my enthusiasm to further promote, educate, and support the cloud-native community. Leveraging my prior experience as a speaker and maintainer, I am now even better positioned to advocate for and strengthen the ecosystem through advocacy and knowledge sharing.

Bob is a Program Manager at the Google Open Source Programs Office with a focus on Cloud Native computing. He serves the Kubernetes project as a Steering Committee member and chair of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group and has been involved in many other cross-cutting areas of the project. Bob comes from an academic background, spending 15 years at the University of Michigan with a later focus on computational research. He is passionate about Academic Outreach, and is an outspoken advocate of Open Source, Open Science and pets of the furry 4 legged variety.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Just happy to be a part of the new program and help other ambassadors 🙂

Brad is originally from New Zealand now working in Australia as the Head of Platform Engineering, he has been involved in the DevOps space for a long time now and serves as a board member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Brad is a maintainer of the Keptn project and works on the Kubernetes Release team. And is involved in mentoring in GSoC projects. His favorite projects to work on from the CNCF are GitOps, Security and Observability projects. He is helping to organize the KCD Australia and also runs a meetup in Australia.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador to further help and mentor other folks coming into the cloud native space and guide them in the right direction. I’m also excited because I can continue working on the outreach of the CNCF and show organizations how they can contribute and help grow the projects and unlock innovation.

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

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

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

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

Daniel Oh is Java Champion and Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat. He works to evangelize building cloud-native microservices and serverless functions with cloud-native runtimes to developers. He also continues to contribute to various open-source cloud projects and ecosystems as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ambassador for accelerating DevOps adoption in enterprises. Daniel also speaks at technical seminars, workshops, and meetups to elaborate on new emerging technologies for enterprise developers, SREs, platform engineers, and DevOps teams.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It will give me more opportunities to meet more technical folks who want to adopt/learn new cloud-native technologies and tools. Also, the ambassador makes me a more proactive person to evangelize non-tech people in terms of how/why they move forward to the cloud.

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

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

Di Xu is passionate about open source projects and get involved in. He is a top-60 code contributor in Kubernetes community and founds CNCF Sandbox project Clusternet. He is also an avid speaker and has spoken many times at open source conferences and meetups, including KubeCon, Open Source Summit, etc. Nowadays he is specialized in cloud native, Kubernetes and infrastructure.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been an active member of the Kubernetes community since 2016. I am eager to become a CNCF Ambassador to give back to the open source community and help drive cloud native adoption. My practical experience with CNCF technologies can provide valuable insights to users. As an ambassador, I look forward to mentoring new contributors, staying connected to the latest developments, speaking at events, creating tutorials, and connecting with the cloud native community. This role aligns well with my passion for open source software and interest in emerging cloud native technologies. I am excited by the opportunity to contribute meaningfully as an ambassador, share my knowledge with others and help advance the CNCF ecosystem.

Horovits lives at the intersection of technology, product and innovation. With over 20 years in the hi-tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud native, DevOps practices, open source and more.

Horovits is a public speaker and thought leader in the fields of DevOps, open source and specifically observability, appearing on stage at KubeCon, Open Source Summit, FOSDEM and more. He also runs the popular OpenObservability Talks podcast, and you can also follow his blog and articles.

Horovits is a leader in the Israeli community, an organizer of the CNCF chapter in Tel Aviv, and an organizer of the Israeli editions of Kubernetes Community Days (KCD), KubeDay and DevOpsDays.

Currently working as the Principal Developer Advocate at Logz.io, Horovits evangelizes on Observability in IT systems using popular open source projects such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenSearch.

• Podcast: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/openobservability
• Blog: medium.com/@horovits
• YouTube: youtube.com/@horovits
• Sessionize: sessionize.com/horovits

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’ve been advocating for open source and for the CNCF and its projects for years, online, on stage and with local communities, and I’m looking forward to expanding this activity as a formal CNCF Ambassador.

Eric is Chronosphere’s Director Evangelism. He’s renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author and baseball expert. His current role allows him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies and organizations. Follow on https://www.schabell.org.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to officially have the title of ambassador as I’ve been actively promoting a lot of the work they do for over a decade now.

Guy was fortunate enough to experience hands-on the entire evolution of cloud-native computing, from bare-metal servers to VMs and ultimately to Kubernetes. He is passionate about sharing his vast knowledge by writing blogs, speaking at global events, creating video content, and contributing to open-source projects by the CNCF. Guy has been dubbed “The Good Guy” by his peers and members of the community for his persistent desire to help others. It’s no wonder then that his day job at Komodor revolves around helping organizations to adopt K8s and solve the challenges that come with it, while his free time is dedicated to building a local community for Solution Architects and maintaining his educational Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@the_good_guy

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to be an ambassador because it allows me to further my mission of sharing knowledge and driving the adoption of cloud-native technologies. As an ambassador, I will have the opportunity to create more resources, collaboration opportunities, and initiatives with the community & end-users to promote adoption and innovation.

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

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

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

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

Interested in open source, machine learning, compiler, and natural language processing. Exploring language parsing with Rust and R. Part of Shadow of Kubernetes Release Team 1.17 and 1.18. Shadow Chairs of Kubernetes SIGs Docs. Emeritus-Co-Chairs of Kubernetes SIGs Docs. Contributing in Kubernetes, Planout and Ax (Facebook), Google Cloud Platform and Google API (Google), Keras. Programme Committee at Helm Summit 2019. Programme Committee at Grace Hopper 2020. Programme Committee at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon APAC 2020. Programme Committee at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2020. KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Track Chair for ML & Data EU 2021 NA 2022. Track Host for CPPCon 2022. Mentor At Grace Hopper OSD 2022.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to be a Cloud Native Foundation ambassador because it offers an incredible platform to advocate for state-of-the-art cloud technologies and best practices. Being part of this community allows me to engage with thought leaders, share knowledge, and contribute to shaping the future of cloud computing. Moreover, this role empowers me to bridge the gap between developers, businesses, and the broader public, fostering innovation and growth in the ecosystem.

Johann is a passionate software engineer living in Switzerland. He has over 20 years of industry experience working as a developer, architect, trainer, and consultant in various domains and for different customers. Johann is enthusiastic about the cloud-native movement and organizes the Swiss Cloud Native day (https://cloudnativeday.ch) and the Cloud Native Bern Meetup (http://www.cloudnativebern.ch).

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Bringing engineers together at meetups and conferences is a fulfilling and inspirational task. I love to connect with this thriving community on a local and international level. And I would like to raise awareness of environmental sustainability.

I am the co-founder and CTO of Seiso, where we work with software companies to improve their security and compliance. I’ve been contributing to open source for the past decade; I’m a member of the CNCF Security TAG, run a meetup called Steel City InfoSec, the BSides Pittsburgh conference, and teach Cloud and DevOps Security classes.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m looking to help people adopt cloud native technology quickly and securely!

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.

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!

Juliano is a passionate Software Engineer/Developer Advocate with extensive experience in cloud-related technologies. He is specialized in OpenTelemetry and is always working with Kubernetes, Helm, Containers, Jenkins, and other related tools. As one of the maintainers of the CNCF project OpenTelemetry Demo, Juliano has helped to create a distributed system that demonstrates the implementation of OpenTelemetry in a near real-world environment. With a strong belief in the power of community, Juliano co-founded the Cloud Native Linz meetup. He actively participates in the tech community and is always willing to share his knowledge and insights with others. When not working, Juliano likes to spend his time with the family traveling around Austria and sightseeing new places.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I strongly believe in the power of the community and how it can help everyone grow, not just professionally, but as a whole. I’m extremely excited about being able to help growing the CNCF community and raising it awareness wherever I go. I love learning and sharing what I learn. The atmosphere and environment of openness created by CNCF is something that I take with me in every interaction I have. I’m super excited and thankful in becoming a CNCF Ambassador.

Julien Pivotto is a prominent figure in the world of open-source monitoring and alerting. As a maintainer of Prometheus, he has made significant contributions to the development and advancement of this powerful tool. Additionally, he is the co-founder of O11y, a company that specializes in providing premium support for various open-source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As a maintainer, I am truly enthusiastic about being a CNCF ambassador because the foundation contributes significantly to the success and growth of numerous open-source projects. By becoming an ambassador, I can give back to the community by promoting CNCF’s initiatives, spreading awareness about its contributions, and helping others discover the value of cloud native technologies.

I’m a software engineer building telemetry tools. I’m active in the OpenTelemetry community and have been one of the Jaeger project maintainers in the past, having also contributed to OpenTracing. I also love to spread knowledge about the tools I work with, having had the pleasure of speaking at KubeCon (EU and NA), OpenSource Summit (EU and NA), FOSDEM, Devoxx, among others. And more recently, I started a side project called Dose de Telemetria, where I create deeply technical content related to observability, monitoring, and telemetry in my native language, Portuguese.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Recognizing that language might be a barrier for people to understand the CNCF ecosystem and projects, I will focus on sharing knowledge in Portuguese. I’m also looking forward to fostering the ecosystem around our observability tooling, with a particular focus on OpenTelemetry but not limited to it.

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!

Kristina Devochko is a platform engineer, tech content creator, speaker and tech community contributor based in Norway. She focuses on all things cloud native, Kubernetes, cloud security and green tech. Kristina is an owner of kristhecodingunicorn.com tech blog, a CNCF Ambassador, Microsoft Azure MVP, CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability tech lead, Kubernetes Unpacked podcast host, co-organizer of multiple meetup groups and mentor. In her free time Kristina enjoys doing CTF challenges, 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 🙂

Working as the CTO of LAB3, one of the fastest growing Microsoft Partners in the Southern Hemisphere, with a focus on leveraging Cloud-Native solutions for enterprise and regulated clients. Large background in the use of IaC especially Terraform and ways of working in the ANZ region. Extremely fortunate to run both the Melbourne and Brisbane HashiCorp User Group (Meetup)

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I can’t wait to connect with some of the most active and intelligent ambassadors for the CNCF space and learn from them

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

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.

Lucas is an independent cloud native expert, former Kubernetes SIG co-lead, an avid KubeCon speaker, and one of the organizers of the CNCF meetups in Finland. Primary expertise include Kubernetes, GitOps and educating cloud native concepts.

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.

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.

Max is Co-Founder and Cloud Native Advocate at Liquid Reply. He is Co-Chair of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Technical Advisory Group and served 3 years at the Kubernetes release team. His focus is on designing and building cloud-native solutions on/with Kubernetes anywhere and the platform engineering to simplify the current challenges of complex systems. He runs the Munich Kubernetes Meetup as well as the Munich and Ukraine Kubernetes Community Days.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Being an ambassador is a sign that working with the community and being part of the community is a high value, empowering anyone to join and be part of it. And as ambassadors, we are potentially the enabler to guide people but also motivate others to share their experiences to create a synergy. I’m also excited to meet other ambassadors in person and maybe create new ideas and events.

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 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

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 Red Hat 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.

Paul is a Developer Advocate for the k6 OSS project at Grafana Labs. In this role, he encourages developers and testers alike to “shift left,” bringing reliability testing earlier in the software development process and taking advantage of observability tooling. 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 Kubernetes & Cloud Native STL and StLGo meetup groups.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 !

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Senthil works as a Software Architect, building cloud native AI/ML platforms. He specialises in Cloud native software development, Machine Learning, MLOps, Distributed Systems and Edge Computing. He has 20+ years of experience spanning Telecom, Cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, ML and MLOps. He is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Maintainer of Open-Source project “kube-fledged”, Tech Blogger, Speaker and Organizer of Kubernetes Community Days Chennai. He likes contributing to Open source, building Tech communities, exploring new technologies and mentoring Students.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The cloud native ecosystem is vast and is made up of a plethora of technologies and methodologies. Becoming a CNCF ambassador will help in bringing more focus and structure to my contribution to the community. I’ll have immense opportunities to work closely with CNCF and other Ambassadors. The Ambassador standards of excellence would serve as a north star in making my community contribution more effective. I can rely on support and guidance from CNCF to learn new ways of connecting and collaborating with the community.

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

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

For many years now, I have been a strong advocate for the development and promotion of free and open-source software. My passion for this cause has led me to actively participate in various initiatives, such as organizing the Cloud Native Luxembourg meetups and being part of the French localization team of CNCF Glossary. I’m dedicated to promoting the benefits of open-source software, believing it to be more secure, reliable, and conducive to innovation. Additionally, I leverage my expertise to help teams harness cloud-native technologies, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: Drawing from my passion for open-source, I will strive to promote the ethos of collaboration, emphasizing the merits of open-source projects within the CNCF landscape and encouraging more entities to contribute and participate. I am committed to guiding the next generation of cloud native enthusiasts. Through mentorship programs and hands-on training sessions, I aim to reduce the learning curve for newcomers and ensure they have the necessary tools and knowledge to thrive within the ecosystem. In essence, as a CNCF Ambassador, my overarching goal is to be a catalyst for growth, learning, and innovation within the Cloud Native community, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of technological progress while upholding the values of collaboration, inclusivity, and open-source spirit.

KCD France Organizer & Director of Technical Product Management at Kasten by Veeam, I specialize in all things Cloud Native, obviously Kubernetes, but also Storage, Network, Compute, Observability, Security, Infrastructure, etc. From datacenters to applications, from business to operations, I enjoy talking about every aspect of our connected world.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to represent the CNCF as an Ambassador to help others find their path through Cloud Native technologies and get started in the space. There is a technology for everyone, and there is a space for everyone, no matter to skill level, no matter you interest. If you don’t know where to start, come talk to me, I’ll be happy to get you oriented!

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.

Thomas is a Principal Cloud Architect, Advocate and Educator enthusiastic about making cloud-native more comfortable. As a CNCF/CDF Ambassador and Open Source Maintainer (Keptn and K8sGPT), he is always eager to find ways to deliver software and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I am very passionate about cloud-native technologies and working with them is cool. In the last few years, I got more and more involved in the cloud-native community and learned that it’s not only about technical things, it’s also about the people and the community. I am excited to be an ambassador because I like to bring people into the cloud-native world but also educate and teach them how to use products and technologies.

Thomas Vitale is a software engineer and architect working across cloud native development and platform engineering, primarily focusing on developer experience and security. He works at Systematic (Denmark), is the author of the book “Cloud Native Spring in Action” (Manning), and is an organizer of KCD Denmark. Thomas likes contributing to open source projects in the Java and cloud native space (Spring, Keycloak, Carvel, Cartographer, Buildpacks, TAG App Delivery, Paketo), and sharing knowledge with the community. His speaking gigs include KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, KCD, Devoxx, and GOTO. Thomas also likes sharing his cloud native journey on his blog (thomasvitale.com).

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: The community is probably the best part of the cloud native ecosystem. As an ambassador, I’m excited I’ll have the chance to engage even more with this fantastic community, help it grow, and empower more people to realize their goals with cloud native technologies.

Tom is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure API Management, leading Azure API Management’s future to allow customers to build API ecosystems in a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape with its self-hosted gateway and Azure Arc. He has been working in the cloud-native space for 5+ years. Autoscaling is in his DNA and is one of the active maintainers of Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), a CNCF Incubation project that makes application autoscaling on Kubernetes dead simple. It is scaling big enterprises such as Zapier, Reddit, FedEx, Alibaba Cloud, and many others. You can find him around on GitHub maintaining KEDA, Promitor & Azure Deprecation. He turns coffee into scalable & secure cloud systems and writes about his adventures on blog.tomkerkhove.be.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I love to work with the community to build a better cloud-native community and make it easy for everyone to use it and contribute back.

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.

Vineeth is a cloud, distributed systems enthusiast and maintainer to OpenTelemetry Operator, a contributor to Kubernetes, Cortex, and Open Policy Agent. He worked as a shadow for previous Kubernetes releases and was also a docs lead for Kubernetes 1.18 release. He is currently working as a Product Manager with Timescale. Previously, he was a CNCF mentee with Cortex and Open Policy Agent and a Google Summer of Code intern with The Postgres Operator. Vineeth co-founded and organizes CNCF Hyderabad meet-ups and also gave several talks on CNCF technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I have been in the CNCF community for almost 5 years now, learned a lot, and contributed to many projects. Looking forward to playing an active role in CNCF projects, communities and events.

Whitney is a lovable goofball who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. This past fall, Whitney co-presented a silly yet informative keynote about platform building at Kubecon NA 2022 (https://youtu.be/eJG7uIU9NpM). You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV (https://via.vmw.com/Enlightning), and she also co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! – a ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’-style journey through the CNCF landscape. And not only does Whitney rock at tech – she literally has toured playing in the band Mutual Benefit on keyboards and vocals.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: When I was new in the cloud native space, it was very intimidating that in every room that I entered the men *vastly* outnumber the women. It has taken time and intentional effort to learn how to proudly take up space, join conversations, and understand that my opinion as a relative beginner has a lot of value. I’m excited to be a CNCF Ambassador in the hopes that the title will give me connections, credibility, and reach to find and elevate underrepresented voices on the streaming shows that I host. The more visibility we have, the more we can help to create a welcoming environment for everyone. I’m also excited to make SO MANY NEW FRIENDS!

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

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.

I am a software engineer at Tencent Cloud Mesh team, specializing in the cloud-native field with a focus on Service Mesh and API Gateway technologies. I am an active contributor to the open-source community and currently maintain several CNCF projects, including Envoy, Istio, Aeraki-Mesh, and Merbridge. I had the honor of attending as a speaker at KubeCon 2023 Shanghai and am the founder of the Envoy Gateway China community, where I strive to build connections in the open-source realm. In my spare time, I share my knowledge through blog posts on www.liuxunzhuo.com and also work on recording video tutorials, with a passion for helping others and promoting cloud-native technologies.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: As an ambassador, I am thrilled about the opportunity to further engage with the cloud-native community and contribute to its growth and development. I am excited to share my knowledge and experience in CNCF technologies, and help others understand and adopt these technologies. Being an ambassador also allows me to learn from others, stay updated with the latest trends, and continuously improve my skills. Moreover, I am passionate about promoting open-source culture and believe that being an ambassador will provide a great platform to do so. Lastly, I look forward to fostering connections and collaborations within the community, which I believe is the essence of the open-source movement.

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.