A Kubernetes head with a travelling soul, Abhinav is deeply committed to open-source software and cloud-native technologies. As a Solution Architect at Devtron Inc., he manages cloud-based application deployments and actively contributes to the open-source Devtron project.

As a CNCF Ambassador, Abhinav is on a mission to make Kubernetes adoption as easy as packing for a weekend getaway, sharing his experience and knowledge just like his travel stories.

Technical Community Advocate @ Chainguard

Adrian has been involved with containers from the early days of Docker and authored the O’Reilly book “Using Docker”.

He works at Chainguard whose mission is to make the software lifecycle secure by default. His current focus is on improving the standard of security and provenance guarantees in container images.

Adriana Villela is a Principal Developer Advocate, helping companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability, SRE, & DevOps practices. Previously, 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 is a blogger, host of the Geeking Out Podcast, CNCF Ambassador, and HashiCorp Ambassador.

Ahmet Alp Balkan is a software engineer leading the Kubernetes cluster management group at LinkedIn, working on moving a large bare-metal compute footprint to Kubernetes.

Prior to LinkedIn, Ahmet has spent nearly 10 years working at Twitter, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure primarily on container-based open source technologies and services such as Kubernetes, GKE, Knative. He pioneered the work to port Docker to Windows and bringing Docker into the Azure ecosystem. He maintains developer tools like kubectx and krew.

Andy is responsible for Linux strategy within the Azure Core organization, having joined Microsoft through the acquisition of Kinvolk, where he was chief commercial officer. Previously, Andy co-founded Tigera and Calico, the foundational open source cloud native networking and network security project, before which he ran the networking businesses unit at Metaswitch. He holds a joint MBA from Berkeley and Columbia Business Schools. He also has masters degrees in software engineering, philosophy and mathematics

Avni is a Product Manager at Intuit, working on Intuit’s Modern SaaS Kubernetes platform. She also worked on ArgoCD as a PM. Avni is passionate about Developer tooling and strives to make developers' life easier by delivering them delightful experiences. She is also an Open Source contributor and loves all things cloud native. She is a believer in giving back to the community and has been a speaker and advocate for many women in tech programs and open-source talks.

Ben is a veteran cybersecurity and software professional. He teaches advanced information security in both undergrad and grad classes. He is a co-founder and CTO at CyberArmor. In his previous capacities, he has been a security researcher and architect, pen-tester, and lead developer at Cisco, NDS, and Siemens.

Benazir is a Community Program Manager at Microsoft. She is an avid community builder and works closely with Kubernetes & Cloud Native collaborators in the EU and NA, to ensure seamless event experiences in this space. From creating inclusive programs to ensuring participation of diversity candidates, she's interested in encouraging folks to deliver their first conference speech. She is passionate about bringing seasoned technologists and newbies to work together. In this session, she'll briefly discuss the history of Cloud Native Rejekts and the milestone of this being the 10th edition of the conference!

Carson is a co-organizer of the Utah Gophers meetup and a fixture at the Utah Kubernetes meetup. He may be best known for his "Kubernetes Deconstructed" presentation but he has been speaking at conferences constantly ever since. He currently works at Weave on the Developer Experience team as a Principal Engineer (real title) or alternatively, as the DevX-O (a made up title). As part of this team, he works constantly to improve the quality of life developers by building tooling on top of cloud native infrastructure.

Chad M. Crowell is a prominent figure in the cloud-native community, mainly known for his extensive contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem. He serves as a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Ambassador, where he plays a crucial role in advocating for and promoting cloud-native technologies.

Chad's expertise in various Kubernetes-related projects, including his contributions to the Kubernetes project itself, as well as other significant technologies like Helm, Istio, and Prometheus, has solidified his position as a respected authority in the field.

Chad's commitment to sharing knowledge is evident in his role as an author and educator. His book, "Acing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam," is a highly regarded resource for individuals preparing for Kubernetes certification, and his courses are widely used by those seeking to deepen their understanding of Kubernetes.

Chad is deeply involved in community engagement. He actively participates in events like KCD Texas and the Austin Kubernetes meetup, where he teaches and mentors others about Kubernetes. His approach to making Kubernetes learning fun and interactive has helped many in the community.

He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and events, sharing his knowledge on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices. He helps spread best practices through his presentations and deepens the community's understanding of these critical technologies.

Chad has also contributed to the educational space through platforms like A Cloud Guru and INE, where he provides courses on Kubernetes and related cloud-native technologies, further establishing himself as a leading educator in the field.

Chris Kuehl is a Principal Technical PM @ Microsoft, former founder and CEO @ Kinvolk, and the creator of Cloud Native Rejekts. He has been envolved in open source software and communities for more than 20 years and doing it professionally for about the last 15 years.

Systems and software engineer. Passionate about distributed systems and cloud technologies. Hands-on experience in web services, cloud computing and large systems architecture. Focusing on Kubernetes and infrastructure observability. Open source enthusiast and Opentelemetry contributor.

Danilo (Dan) Chiarlone is a Software Engineer at Microsoft, a core maintainer of Hyperlight, and a champion of seven WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) proposals. He is the author of Server-Side WebAssembly and an advocate for Wasm's role in cloud computing, security, and serverless technologies.

David Morrison is a research scientist at Applied Computing Research Labs, an open-source research and development lab exploring scheduling and optimization problems in distributed computing. Previously, David was a staff engineer at Airbnb and at Yelp. David received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2014. He is a prolific public speaker, having given presentations at KubeCon, LISA, MesosCon, and others.

Connect on Mastodon! https://hachyderm.io/@drmorr

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.

Eric is a 30+ year enterprise software developer, architect, and consultant with a focus on CI/CD, DevOps, and container-based solutions over the last decade. He is a Docker Captain, is certified in Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD, CKS), and has been a Docker user since 2013. As a Staff Solutions Architect at Chainguard, Eric helps teams deploy their applications securely by minimizing container image footprint and CVE counts.

Gabriele, a co-founder of 2ndQuadrant and open-source advocate, has been instrumental in PostgreSQL's global growth. Focused on enhancing business continuity for large-scale databases, he has championed stateful workloads in cloud-native environments since 2019. As a co-founder and maintainer of CloudNativePG, PostgreSQL Contributor, and Data on Kubernetes (DoK) Ambassador, he actively shapes PostgreSQL's evolution in Cloud Native environments. Currently, he is a VP Chief Architect at EDB.

Software Engineer at Microsoft AKS specializing in Kubernetes for AI, focusing on deploying large AI/ML models. Previously, I worked as an ML Engineer at YC-backed AI company Windsor.io, leading up to its acquisition. I am a recent master's graduate from the University of Illinois, where I conducted research in systems for AI. Additionally, I served as a head teaching assistant, helping hundreds of students in cloud networking and computer architecture courses.

Jan is a Senior Product Manager at Percona, leading the products for PostgreSQL. He has vast experience in the development, deployment and maintenance of enterprise systems. Professionally, he is passionate about simple solutions that solve complicated problems and user experience that maximizes the product potential. Privately he is a foodie by day, a tech geek into graphic novels, video and board games by night and parent/spouse in between. Having spent already almost two years in Percona, most of us learned that he has enough energy and topics to fill in any space and time

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 in the mountains.

I’m a Machine Learning platform engineer with over 15 years of experience. I’m an expert in using AI to solve practical business applications. I’ve built platforms for YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, and Primer to enable ML Engineers and data scientists to rapidly develop and deploy models into production. I played a pivotal role in developing systems like YouTube’s Video Recommendations. I also made major contributions to open-source software, including creating Kubeflow, one of the most popular OSS frameworks for ML.

I’m an expert in Cloud services, Kubernetes, MLOps, LLMOps, CICD, IAC, and GitOps.

I’m currently developing an AI assistant, Foyle (www.foyle.io) to simplify deploying and operating software.

I live in the Bay Area with my dog, Teddy. When I’m not working, I enjoy skiing, baking chocolate chip cookies, and hanging out with Teddy.

Jiaxiao (Joe) Zhou is a Software Engineer at Microsoft. He is on the Azure Container Upstream team and works on bringing WebAssembly to the cloud through projects like "runwasi", "SpiderLightning", and "containerd-wasm-shims". He is a Recognized Contributor to the Bytecode Alliance and made contributions to many Wasm upstream projects, and has been a champion for a few WASI proposals under the umbrella "wasi-cloud-core"

Joaquim has been involved in a number of Free and Open Source Software projects for the past 15 years, from the Linux desktop and phones to the cloud.
He is an Emeritus Member of the GNOME Foundation and has been a speaker in events such as KubeCon, GUADEC, and FOSDEM.
Joaquim currently works as a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Joshua is a seasoned software developer with over a decade of experience, specializing in a broad range of topics including operations, observability, agile methodologies, and accessibility. His passion for technology is matched by his enthusiasm for sharing knowledge through public speaking. Currently, Joshua serves as a Developer Advocate for Altinity, where he creates educational content on ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry. Additionally, he is an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry project, helping to advance the field of observability in software development.

Jubril is a software engineer interested in infrascture and all things cloud native, when he’s not building infrastructure he’s sharing his learnings through technical writing.

Justin is the director of developer relations at Sidero Labs. He helps companies simplify their Kubernetes and Linux infrastructure. He previously helped create Oscar winning movies at Disney, built infrastructure for Disney+, and improved Amazon EKS as part of the product team. In his spare time he builds modern-retro computers and streams Moana on repeat.

Kyle is the creator of DockerSlim (aka SlimToolkit), a popular tool to inspect, optimize and debug containers. He's the founder/CEO of AutonomousPlane.dev and he's also the founder/CTO of Slim.AI. He's building an AI agent to automatically fix vulnerabilities in cloud native application dependencies. Kyle has been building applications and platforms using many different programming languages since the early days of cloud computing. He’s been involved in security for more than two decades wearing many different hats as a builder, breaker and defender.

Lachlan is a Principal Program Manager on Cloud Native Ecosystem team. Lachlan has served in many different roles in the cloud native ecosystem including cloud native ambassador, emeritus Kubernetes steering committee member and release lead, and has deep operational knowledge of many cloud native projects. He spends his days building and contributing to software that addresses key challenges in the cloud native ecosystem.

Leigh is building Flox and is active with the Kubernetes and Flux projects.

He has a background in infrastructure software with a security niche.
He authored Flux 2's security model and kubeadm's mTLS implementation and is currently working on Kubernetes authorization with SIG Auth.

Leigh and his wife love to snowboard in Colorado and have 3 dogs.

Leonardo Cecchi, a principal in software development at EDB, plays a pivotal role as a maintainer in the CloudNativePG project and Biganimal, EDB's DBaaS offering. With a longstanding preference for PostgreSQL dating back to 1998, his expertise in this DBMS is extensive. Before EDB acquired 2ndQuadrant, Leonardo worked as a developer and a PostgreSQL consultant. He is a founding member of the CloudNativePG project, which started in 2019.

Lori has a passion and enthusiasm for working with the developer and open source community. She is a CNCF Ambassador, former CNCF Marketing Committee Chair, former Chair of the CDF Outreach Marketing Committee, program chair of cdCon 2023, and is active in the OpenSSF devrel committee. She co-hosts the CD Pipeline on behalf of the CDF with TechstrongTV. She is committed to helping open source and other tech communities grow and adapt in our ever changing environment. She is currently Head of Community for Percona.

Marcus is a platform engineer at Giant Swarm, a company dedicated to offering managed Kubernetes solutions, a Civo Ambassador and a CNCF Ambassador. 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.

Customer Success Engineer at Humanitec and CNCF Ambassador, I’m passionate about Cloud Native Computing technologies driven by Open Source, Cloud, Security, SRE, Containers, DevOps, Platform Engineering and Kubernetes. Based on my past experiences as software engineer, IT consultant and solution architect, I now focus my work more and more on usability of products, driven by how I could improve the developers and end-users experience with docs, samples and products.

Matteo is a seasoned engineer. Starting as a web developer covered diverse roles, from Java dev to full stack dev. He later embraced DevOps and Cloud and a few years later, ventured into freelancing as Cloud Native Consultant, while digital nomading across Europe.

Builder, startup lover, advocate for Cloud Native technologies and active member of the CNCF community, Matteo is a k8s enthusiast and aspires to impact IT through Platform Engineering.
@mbianchidev on (almost) every social media

Mattias is working as Director of Tech at Venafi, specializing in helping companies with their Cloud Native strategy. A strong open-source enthusiast, Mattias has been active in the Cloud Native ecosystem since the early days when Kubernetes was first established.

More recently, he has focused on DevSecOps. With a deep interest in Cloud Native Security, Software Supply Chain Security, and Workload Identity, he regularly shares his insights on how to adopt cutting-edge security practices.

Mauricio works as a software engineer at Microsoft. He is the Tech lead for theCNCF project Inspektor Gadget and generally interested in eBPF, Kubernetes, networking and low level programming. Mauricio has used eBPF in different scopes like implementing network virtual functions (polycube project).

In my current role at RBC - Royal Bank of Canada, I lead the Kubernetes Security program, overseeing security architecture, cloud threat research, threat modeling, and risk assessment of cloud designs and patterns.

Additionally, I collaborate closely with our strategic partners, cultivating and sustaining business relationships with third-party providers, including Microsoft/Google Product teams, and emerging cloud security startups.

Mayuresh Krishna is the CTO and Co-Founder of initializ.ai, where he drives product engineering, building AI models and private AI services. He has previously worked at VMware Tanzu as a Solution Engineering Leader & Pivotal Software as a Senior Platform Architect.

A Software Quality Engineer at Red Hat, where I work with the OpenShift Container Platform team.

Apart from the full-time job, I also participate in upstream community initiatives, such as being a Branch Manager in v1.31, a CI Signal Lead in Kubernetes Release v1.28 (been a shadow in v.127 & v1.26), a GSoC’22 Student Developer who focused on integrating ArgoCD with Keptn, an LFX Spring Mentee'22 at CNCF worked on improved planning of SIG Network Gateway API Docs.

Michael McCune is a software developer creating open source infrastructure and applications for cloud platforms. He has a passion for problem solving and team building, and a lifelong love of music, food, and culture.

Mihai Maruseac is a Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he leads the work on OSS AI Supply Chain Security as part of SAIF, as a member of Google’s OSS Security Team (GOSST). Previously, he helped in launching GUAC, an OpenSSF project to analyze and understand the software supply chain. Before joining GOSST, he worked on TensorFlow developer infrastructure and created the TensorFlow security team. Mihai has experience with AI, operating systems, differential privacy and functional programming – Haskell being his favorite programming language. He blogs at mihai.page, from time to time.

Natalie has always been majorly interested in the world of software and infrastructure. She's worked with Shipyard since 2021, where she's developed a valuable understanding of environment management and its best practices. In her free time, Natalie DJs a radio show and is a volunteer ski instructor.

Solutions Architect with 15+ years of CyberSecurity, DevOps, Software Development and Automation experience. He is an active member in the open source community contributing/path-finding on various projects. Maintainer on the OpenSSF project GUAC (Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition), in-toto-golang and in-toto attestations. Outside of work, he loves to travel and find new restaurants to explore!

Meet Peter Szczepaniak, your friendly Senior Product Manager at Percona. With over 15 years in the IT industry, Peter is your go-to expert for User Experience and highly technical products based on Kubernetes. His knack for seamless digital solutions comes from a Bachelor's in IT from the University of Gdansk, backed by an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for user-centric design. Get ready to dive into the world of impactful products with Peter!

Priya is a Principal Software Engineer in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell service, where she focuses on building and maintaining a highly available infrastructure and addressing complex security challenges. She has a strong interest in backend, infrastructure, and distributed systems, and is eager to learn more about cloud-native migrations, whether large or small.

Ram Iyengar is an engineer by practice and an educator at heart. He was (cf) pushed into technology evangelism along his journey as a developer and hasn’t looked back since! He enjoys helping engineering teams around the world discover new and creative ways to work. He is a proponent of product development and engineering teams that put the community first.

Sanath has spent the last 8 years working on Compute Infrastructure at LinkedIn. He has led teams which developed customized deployment schedulers tailored for LinkedIn's specific workloads, operating in both on-prem and Azure environments. He also worked as the tech lead for the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system at LinkedIn, which runs the kubernetes Platform at LinkedIn.

Scott has been building platforms with Kubernetes for the last several years, former Google, VMware, Knative, Chainguard.

Shail Shah is a Sr software engineer at Intuit. Passionate about Distributed Systems and Platform Engineering. Shail has worked as a core contributor to Intuit's journey towards kubernetes abstraction platform, helping reducing cognitive overload for developers.

Shivansh is a long-time open-source developer who started his Cloud Native journey back in 2018 at IBM where his work centred around various container and Kubernetes platforms. He was also actively involved in the early days of service meshes, and today, he is the Founder and CEO of Loophole Labs where he is actively focused creating new developer primitives by leveraging WebAssembly. He created and is currently a core maintainer of the fRPC, Polyglot, and Scale projects.