Since 1995, Alastair has deployed, administered, programmed and supported all things database, from Access to Universe, settling on Postgres around 2002. After being hit by the Kubernetes wave around 2018, Alastair has learned more than he ever wanted to about validating yaml and helped his fellow database enthusiasts discover containers, immutability and how an operator may be a person or a piece of software.

Alexandre Bissessur, who most commonly goes by Alex, is a young IT professional specialising in Cloud Native technologies, particularly Kubernetes. He is an organiser of the Cloud Native Chapter in Mauritius. Alongside Cloud Native, Alex is experienced in many other domains including development and system administration.
An avid homelabber, he takes a lot of pride in the servers he runs in the living room at home, much to the displeasure of his parents.
Finally, he is a strong advocate for FOSS, pushing for more widespread adoption back home in Mauritius.

With a decade in Observability, Alex Wert is an enthusiast dedicated to advancing the field. In various roles he has engaged with diverse open and proprietary observability solutions. Presently leading Elastic's Edge Collection team, Alex contributes actively to the open-source community. He is a maintainer of the OTel Semantic Conventions project and spearheads Elastic's commitment to OTel through leading the contribution of the Elastic Common Schema and other OTel contributions from Elastic.

Alexon works as a Principal Technical Account Manager at Red Hat focusing on Infrastructure and Management, Integration and Automation, Cloud Computing, Storage, and AI Solutions. He also contributes to produce and enhance documentation, knowledge-base articles, blog posts, presentations, webinars, and workshops. When he is not at work, he enjoys spending quality time with his family (wife, two children, and cat) and participating in several volunteer jobs.

As a Customer Success Engineer at Diagrid, Alice helps customers with app modernization scenarios using Dapr through architecture design sessions, demos and discussions, and by getting hands-on with proof of concepts. A self-proclaimed people-person, Alice loves nothing more than working through a tough customer problem and seeing it to completion. Before Diagrid, Alice worked at Microsoft for several years in the Azure app-dev space; a former front-end developer she holds a degree in Computer Science and Math.

Antonela has a background in the finance and pharma industry with experience in SRE, cloud, and automation. She has demonstrated success in effectively leading and implementing intricate infrastructure and automation projects, fostering collaboration across cross-functional teams, and architecting scalable solutions. In her current role at Novo Nordisk, she serves as a tech lead for Control Plane, leveraging Crossplane and Argocd workflows.

Artem Lajko, certified Kubestronaut and Platform Engineer, specializes in GitOps and Kubernetes scalability. He's a published author of the book "Implementing GitOps with Kubernetes", co-founder of connectii.io, and IT freelancer, writing for ITNEXT on Medium. Dedicated to Open Source, Artem helps companies select suitable products, promoting tech adoption and innovation.

Ben is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ARMO, a cybersecurity company focused on securing cloud-native environments. He has a deep background in cybersecurity, cloud security, and software and system engineering, playing a key role in the creation of Kubescape, an open-source Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that helps organizations secure their Kubernetes clusters and workloads.

Before founding ARMO, Ben worked at NDS, Siemens, and Cisco in various roles, including security researcher, software architect, and various leadership roles. His experience spans network security, secure software development, and DevSecOps, contributing to his expertise in building advanced security solutions.

In addition to his industry work, Ben is a lecturer for a graduate course in Information Security at Hadassah College.

Community Program Manager with expertise in OSS & Cloud Native events.

Carlos Mestre del Pino is a cloud solution architect at Microsoft in Amsterdam. With over three years of Kubernetes experience, he has managed large Kubernetes environments and is now supporting Azure's customers on their Kubernetes and platform building journey.

Member of the organizing team for KCD Netherlands, he is a community oriented person which loves sharing his knowledge and passion for technology, as he has previously done such as Cloud Native Rejekts in Paris and KCD Denmark 2024.

Christopher is Software Engineer for upbound on open source software. He is a regular contributor to open source and a maintainer for providers in crossplane eco-system. He has many years’ experience in the creation of enterprise infrastructure for different industries, from Telco&Railway to Cloud.

Clay Baenziger is a Senior Engineer in Bloomberg’s Cloud Native Compute Services organization, where he focuses on building common tooling used by our Kubernetes platforms, including KServe inference, Jupyter notebooks, Argo workflows, Spark computation, and more. Clay has been active in the development of open source software from computer operating systems to data infrastructure, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache HBase. He is passionate about resolving all kinds of infrastructure challenges.

Edith is a Tech Evangelist at Percona Everest, deeply passionate about open source. Over her career, she has made impactful contributions to projects like Kubernetes Release, Docker, and Apache Airflow during her Outreachy internship. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador, Edith actively promotes cloud-native technologies. She is from Peru and currently resides in the UK under a Global Talent Visa and is an active member and volunteer in the Data on Kubernetes Community, a dedicated volunteer at various open source events. LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edithpuclla/

Eric is Chronosphere's Director Evangelism. He's renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author, baseball expert, and CNCF Ambassador. His current role allows him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with 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. More on https://www.schabell.org.

Faeka Ansari is a sub-project maintainer for Kubernetes and a key maintainer of the Kargo project. With expertise in designing & optimizing Kubernetes controllers, she specializes in streamlining workflows and improving developer experience. She has previously contributed to cloud-native projects like ArgoCD, Kyverno, and Kubernetes. As a CNCF Ambassador, she focuses on simplifying complex systems and technologies, making them accessible through tools, talks, and educational initiatives.

Frederic is the founder of Polar Signals. Before founding Polar Signals he was a senior principal engineer and main architect for all things Observability at Red Hat, joining through the CoreOS acquisition. Frederic is a Prometheus & Thanos maintainer and tenured as a tech lead for SIG instrumentation in Kubernetes for 4 years. In his previous life, he was a security researcher and when not working on software Frederic enjoys obsessing over brewing a perfect cup of coffee.

Graziano is a software engineer and passionate about agile development and product management. Formerly a developer of distributed systems in enterprise environments and a product manager, he focuses on sharing the myriad beauties of the cloud-native world. Active in international communities with talks and articles, he mainly deals with architectures, AI, platform engineering, and environmental sustainability in the software realm. More on: https://www.castograziano.com/

Henrik is a Cloud Native Advocate at Dynatrace and a CNCF Ambassador . Prior to Dynatrace, Henrik has worked more than 15 years, as Performance Engineer. Henrik Rexed Is Also one of the Organizer of the conferences named WOPR, KCD Austria and the owner of the Youtube Channel IsitObservable.

Imma is a Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs who loves automating things and anything that helps get apps from development to production.

She enjoys sharing with local communities and helping them connect and thrive. You can find her co-organizing Grafana’s meetups in Barcelona and Madrid, Cloud Native Barcelona meetups, Software Crafters Barcelona, and KCD Barcelona 2024.

She also volunteers as a coach and board member at the TechFems Barcelona community and collaborates as a judge with Technovation Girls.

She is a Bruce Springsteen fan. No surrender!

James is software engineer specialising in cloud native software, distributed systems, and networking. He's currently working as Principal Customer Success Architect, Isovalent at Cisco, and has previously worked at Jetstack as a Staff Solutions Engineer and an engineer in fintech before that.

James an active contributor to Kubernetes and Cilium. He was previously a member of the Kubernetes release team from Kubernetes v1.18 though v1.24, culminating in being the Release Team Lead for Kubernetes 1.24 Stargazer 🔭. He's also served as the Emeritus Adviser for Kubernetes 1.27 Chill Vibes 🦥.

Jed Salazar started his Security and SRE journey working on Borg clusters and securing Alphabet companies at Google. He's passionate about security and SRE and spreading knowledge to benefit everyone in the community. In his free time, he enjoys trail running the mountains of Boulder, Colorado.

Jimmy Zelinskie is a software engineer and product leader with the goal of empowering the world through the democratization of software through open source development. He's currently the CPO and cofounder of authzed where he's focused on bringing hyperscaler best-practices in authorization software to the industry at large.

At CoreOS, he helped pioneer the cloud-native ecosystem by starting and contributing to many of its foundational open source projects. After being acquired by Red Hat, his focus shifted to the enablement and adoption of cloud-native technologies by mature enterprise stakeholders. To this day, he still contributes to cloud-native ecosystem by building the future on top of these technologies and maintaining standards such as Open Container Initiative (OCI).

Joe Salisbury is VP Engineering at Giant Swarm. He’s tasked with making Giant Swarm an attractive work environment for engineers and generally a dope place to work. When he’s not ensuring engineering operational excellence, he can be found rowing and playing D&D, but just not at the same time… yet.

Joe Yostos is a Product Manager at Microsoft, where he focuses on Container Networking Security and Observability. With a strong background in networking, security, and cloud-native technologies, Joe plays a key role in driving product development and delivering innovative solutions to optimize performance, security, and observability in containerized environments.
With over 15 years of experience across companies like Sysdig, VMware, Tigera/Calico, and Dell-EMC, Joe combines his deep technical expertise with a passion for solving complex challenges in the cloud ecosystem.

Jussi Nummelin is a tech veteran with 20+ years in IT and software. Currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Mirantis, he leads the k0s Kubernetes distro development efforts. Jussi embraced containers early, deploying Docker 0.6 to production. Since 2017, he's been working in and around Kubernetes. Being hardheaded he still takes joy from building tools and solutions to bring cloud-native to masses. Beyond tech, he finds peace as an avid fisherman.

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

Lucas is a Kubernetes and cloud native contributor and expert who has been serving the CNCF community in various lead positions. He was a CNCF Ambassador for 7 years and was awarded Top CNCF Ambassador 2017 with Sarah Novotny. Lucas was a co-lead for SIG Cluster Lifecycle, WG Component Standard, co-created kubeadm, Weave Ignite, and ported Kubernetes to ARM. Lucas founded and ran 3 meetups in Finland, co-created the meetup collective Cloud Native Nordics and has spoken at 10 KubeCons, including delivering a keynote with Nikhita Raghunath. Lucas wrote his BSc thesis on cloud native principles, and is now researching access control in cloud native control plane APIs, today working as a Senior Software Engineer at Upbound.

Luigi is a seasoned Kubernetes Engineer with experience designing and implementing Kubernetes at scale in on-prem environments, with a focus on automation and scalability.

Mackenzie is a security researcher and advocate with a passion for code security. He is the former CTO and founder of Conpago, where he learned firsthand the importance of building secure applications. Today, Mackenzie works for Aikido security to help developers and DevOps engineers build secure systems. He also shares his knowledge as a contributor to many technology publications like DarkReading, Financial Times, and Security Boulevard along with appearing as an expert in TV documentaries and interviews.

Since March 2024, Manuel has rejoined the codecentric team as a Solution Architect. His main focus continues to be passionately on cloud-native software development, API gateways, service meshes, and Kubernetes in general. Additionally, Manuel remains a maintainer of the well-known cloud-native application proxy Traefik.

Marcus is a platform engineer at Giant Swarm, a company dedicated to offering managed Kubernetes solutions. His main area of focus in recent years has been around Go, Kubernetes, containers and DevOps but originally started out as a web developer and JavaScript enthusiast. A self-described “tinkerer”, when not building Kubernetes solutions, Marcus likes to dabble with 3D printing and experimenting with smart home tech.

Developer and DevOps - Maintainer of Traefik.
Head of Development at Traefik Labs, the company behind Traefik, the popular cloud-native Gateway Controller, and Traefik Hub, a comprehensive API Management solution for Kubernetes.
Responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Gateway API in Traefik.

Micah is a Principal Software Engineer at AWS and works on Kubernetes and container security

Open Source Software Engineer at Microsoft Upstream Networking Team, working to make Envoy better for everyone!
Before Microsoft I've been an SRE in Google for almost 7 years.

Moritz is a platform architect, Open Source maintainer and contributor in the Kubernetes Ecosystem with a strong interest in information security and automation. He's employed at Form3 and currently operating a true multi-cloud Kubernetes platform across three cloud providers and bare-metal.

Nic is an experienced hands-on technologist, evangelist and product owner who has been working in the fields of Cloud-Native technologies, Open Source Software, Virtualization and Datacenter networking for the past 18 years.

Passionate about enabling users and building cool tech solving real-life problems, you'll often see him speaking at global tech conferences and online events, spreading the word and walking the walk with customers and users.

Nicolai Ort is a Cloud Platform Engineer at DATEV, a German software house and IT service provider specializing in solutions for tax consultants, auditors and lawyers. He is an advocate for using and contributing to open-source technologie. Nicolai has gained experience across various roles across the IT industry, including software development, platform architecture and infrastructure operations.

Nigel Douglas is the Head of Developer Relations at Cloudsmith. He champions Cloudsmith’s developer ecosystem by creating compelling educational content, engaging with developer communities, and promoting Cloudsmith as the go-to solution for artifact management and supply chain security. Working closely with product, engineering, and marketing teams, Nigel helps build and shape the DevOps community through events, tutorials, and innovative programs.

Before joining Cloudsmith, Nigel held similar roles in cloud-native OSS projects, including the CNCF Graduate Project Falco at Sysdig and Project Calico at Tigera. He earned a Master of Science in Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Trust from South East Technological University in Ireland.

Nitish is a Software Engineer at Akuity and a CNCF Ambassador. In the past, Nitish has served as a Linux Foundation Mentee under the Kubernetes Release Engineering Team, where he built a library that is used by the Kubernetes project internally. Nitish has given various talks in the past around cloud-native, DevOps, and Security, one of which he led a panel discussion at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, 2023 and 2024. He has also been featured on one of the Veam Podcast Show.

Associate Research Software Engineer @ RedHat

Paul is an associate software engineer based in Waterford, Ireland. He is currently working on the P2CODE EU Horizon project, with a focus on cloud and storage.

Pedro Henrique is a ISV Solution Architect at AWS serving clients on their containers and open source journey. Pedro has experience working with distribuited systems, modernization, cloud native application, GitOps and platform Engineering. He also contributes to open source projects such as twelve factors and has spoken about CNCF projects at CNCF KCD and third-party community events.

Piotr is an architect in the field of security, networking, and clouds. Co-organizer of the Cloud Native Warsaw chapter. Contributor to open-source projects such as Cilium. Designed and implemented Cloud Native and Data Center solutions in global projects. Co-created features in MPLS, Adaptive Code Modulation, and Autonomic Networking solutions. Presenter and author of sessions at CNCF and industry events. He holds CKS, CKA, CCSP, CCDE, CCIE certificates. In his free time he solves puzzles.

Prerit is working as a Software Architect, directing his expertise towards harnessing Cloud Native Technologies to design resilient architectures that can seamlessly scale in the future, all while prioritizing technical cost, security, availability and end-user experience.

Priyanka Saggu is a Kubernetes Engineer at SUSE, contributing to Kubernetes via Release, ContribEx, Testing, and CLI SIGs.

She is the Emeritus Advisor for Kubernetes v1.31, Release Lead for v1.29, GitHub Admin, and Technical Lead for SIG Contributor Experience (SIG ContribEx).

She has also served as Release Lead Shadow (1.27, 1.26), Enhancement Lead (1.25), and part of the Release Team since 1.23.

Priyanka is also an Election Officer for the Kubernetes Steering Committee elections 2024.

Péter holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science. A long-time member of the Budapest cloud-native community, he has contributed to the ecosystem through both technical expertise and advocacy. Previously, Péter founded LeanNet, a consultancy specializing in cloud-native solutions, which was later acquired by adesso SE. He also serves as a part-time assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University, where he teaches cloud-native technologies to the next generation of engineers. Currently, Péter is the co-founder of L7mp Technologies, a company focused on integrating WebRTC solutions into the cloud-native ecosystem.

Software engineer with experience in cloud-native software development and system engineering

Sreeram is a Senior Software Engineer at DigitalOcean and is an active contributor in the Kubernetes community. One of the recipients of the Kubernetes Contributor Awards in 2024, he has been contributing to Kubernetes from 2022. He was part of the Kubernetes release team from v1.29 to v1.32 and was the enhancements sub-team lead for the v1.31 release cycle. He also helps write the Last Week in Kubernetes Development newsletter and has made contributions as part of the special interest groups for kubelet and kube-apiserver. Read about all of Sreeram's contributions here in his blog.

As an advocate for open-source software, I promote innovation and collaboration. With expertise in cloud-native technologies, I help teams overcome challenges, identify improvements, and develop strategies. Committed to continuous learning, I foster collaboration both with external customers and internal teams. As a Cloud Native Ambassador, I inspire others to join the movement and support the growth of open-source software.

Thilo is an engineering manager for Microsoft and works on Linux OS distributions and Linux Security at Azure. Thilo's team helps maintaining Flatcar Container Linux. He has given talks at FOSDEM, FrOSCon, KubeCon, Open Source Summit, Cloud-Native Rejekts, and various meetups like Kubernetes Community Days.

Thilo started his career in embedded systems with hardware design and roll-your-own /from scratch embedded Linux, kernel and plumbing level development, and later virtualisation. After working for various cloud providers in engineering and management positions, he went full cloud native in 2019. Nowadays Thilo works on operating systems for cloud-native environments with a special focus on Flatcar Container Linux.

Co-founder and CTO at Multiplayer, with 30+ years of experience as a backend developer building large-scale distributed software (and robots!)

Tom has a decade of experience in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. He has played a pivotal role in guiding multiple organizations to achieve cloud-native capabilities. His expertise in modernizing SDLC processes and operations has been a cornerstone of his career, with a focus on improving developer experience. At Mirantis, Tom is an integral part of the k0s team. He is dedicated advancing this Kubernetes distribution, driven by the ongoing pursuit of Zero Friction Kubernetes.

Wojciech is a Senior Software Engineer at Chainguard and a Cloud Native expert. Ex-Bitnami, ex-VMware, where he focused on packaging apps for VMs, containers & other formats. Over a decade of experience working with multiple public clouds. Before that, worked in open source as a developer, team leader and architect. Spent most of career leading automation of application packaging & deployments. Also a CNCF Ambassador, co-creator of the Krakow Cloud Native group since 2018, which is part of CNCF.

Yash is a Meshery maintainer and contributes to its open-source projects and community. He is a mentor for the LFX 2024 summer project and was an LFX mentee in the 2023 mentorship under Meshery. He hosts weekly Meshery Development calls. He is an active beta Microsoft Student Ambassador, organizing events on various topics and actively engaging in both the CNCF and student communities to help others.

Yury is an experienced software engineer who strongly focuses on open-source, software quality and distributed systems. As the creator of k8gb (https://www.k8gb.io) and active contributor to the Crossplane ecosystem, he frequently speaks at conferences covering topics such as Control Planes, GSLB, and the experience of running reliable and testable infrastructure at a huge scale. He enjoys his role in Upbound, helping organizations worldwide to revolutionize their infrastructure with Crossplane.