Ambassadors

Annie Talvasto is an award-winning international technology speaker & marketing leader. She has been recognised with the CNCF Ambassador & Azure MVP awards. Annie has been a co-organizer of Kubernetes & CNCF Finland meetup since 2017 and has spoken at technology conferences across the world, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Microsoft Build & Ignite, KCDC and NDC. Annie also has hosted Cloud Native Live, a weekly livestream by CNCF, since 2021.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I believe in the positive impact open source technology and CNCF projects have in the world, and I am excited to continue spreading the word about them!

Aurélie is a Developer Advocate at OVHcloud. She is a CNCF Ambassador, Docker Captain, GDE for Cloud & GitPod Hero. Conferences organizer since 2016. She is a technical writer, a book author & reviewer. She is also a sketchnoter and a speaker at international conferences. She is a co-host for the “Tranches de Tech” OVHcloud podcast. 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
Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Aur%C3%A9lie-Vache/author/B09WHB5YR6

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.

Transformation Architect, SECTION6 BMK is an inspiring and passionate DevOps Advocate and Value Stream Architect promoting DevOps, Lean and Value Stream Management principles & practices. He is also a New Zealand ambassador for the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), DevOps Institute and a Board Advisor for the Value Stream Management consortium(VSMC). He hosts the CNCF meetup in Wellington, New Zealand and is co-chair of Cloud-Native Summit A/NZ. He blogs about his experiences and learnings at https://bmk.nz/

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: 1. Promoting Open Source and Cloud-Native projects and ecosystem tools in our community. 2. Connecting with experts, maintainers, contributors and other Opensource and cloud-native thought leaders to amplify my learning 3. Use the ambassador program and help in bringing in the best to my community in terms of cloud-native learnings, education and training.

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.

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.

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

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

Itay Shakury is VP Open Source at Aqua Security, where he leads engineering and strategy of open source, cloud native, security solutions. Itay has some 20 years of professional experience in various software development, architecture and product management roles. Itay had initiated several local technical communities and events, including the successful CNCF Tel Aviv meetup group.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m honored to be recognized as a CNCF Ambassador, and join this amazing team of worldwide experts. To me, the CNCF is an intersection between two passions of mine – technology and community, which I have been pursuing since early in my career. I’m excited to continue to collaborate with the various technical working groups, events, projects and initiatives that the CNCF ecosystem continuously generates.

Founder at SIGHUP, I have been involved with Kubernetes and the CNCF since its inception in 2015. I am passionate about Kubernetes and full lifecycle management of production-grade infrastructures, open standards and currently serving in the advisory board of Linux Foundation Europe.

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m thrilled to continue supporting the CNCF, both as a community of like-minded individuals and as a technological ecosystem. My mission is to encourage organizations to adopt open source projects as a foundation for the evolution of their infrastructure and governance, promoting the use of OSS and Open Standards.

Jessica runs the Gothenburg chapter for CNCF communities and is an active part in Cloud Native Nordics. She’s building platforms to improve developer experience and passionate about empowering teams to build great products!

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: I’m excited to continue creating an open community for sharing and learning around cloud native technologies and to get a chance to meet other amazing people doing similar work all around the world.

I’m Jim Angel. I love solving problems and working with incredible people! I’m primarily involved with upstream Kubernetes (SIG-Release and SIG-Docs). Currently working on restarting our local Austin meetup and a Texas KCD. You can follow my latest projects at jimangel.io

Why I am excited to be an ambassador: It’s awesome to get to know so many great people and work with leading technology that’s responsible for changing multiple industries. The community that keeps Kubernetes open and welcome is a special thing, and I hope to maintain such standards myself. I also enjoy helping connect the folks using open source tooling with the resources they need to be successful, and being an ambassador keeps me connected.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Lee Calcote is the Founder of Layer5, where the community helps organizations harness and exploit the value of service meshes. Previously, Calcote stewarded technology strategy and innovation across SolarWinds. He led software-defined data center engineering at Seagate, delivering predictive analytics and modern systems management. Calcote held various leadership positions at Cisco, where he created Cisco’s cloud management platforms and pioneered new, automated, remote management services.

In addition to his role at Layer5, Calcote serves in various industry bodies, including as a SIG chair in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and formerly, participated in the delivery of Redfish 1.0 in the Distributed Management Task Foundation (DMTF), and Docker Benchmark 1.0 in Center for Internet Security (CIS). He is a startup advisor, Docker Captain, Cloud Native Ambassador, O’Reilly author, and speaker in the cloud native ecosystem.

Calcote is a maintainer of open source projects, including Meshery, Service Mesh Interface, and Service Mesh Performance. Calcote holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a master’s degree in Business Administration from California State University, Fresno and retains a list of industry certifications.

Meetup: Cloud Native Austin

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! 🙂

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.

Orlin Vasilev aka Orlix is a Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE. Also running the communities and maintainer for Project Harbor. CNCF Ambassador and driving the biggest Meetup Group ~1700 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.

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.

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

Richard “RichiH” Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF TAG Observability chair, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads or organizes various conferences, including PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, freenode work, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TwitchiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.

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.

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