William is a CNCF Ambassador and Linkerd Ambassador currently working at Mirantis as Global Field CTO. He’s focused on helping customers designing, building, and running their initiatives on Edge, AI and Platform Engineering. He wore many hats in the IT world, Engineering, Pre-Post sales, Product Owner and Consulting. from HPC, Storage to Distributed Systems.
William enjoys volunteering in several Cloud Native groups and organizing the KCD Netherlands events.

William is a CNCF Ambassador and Linkerd Ambassador currently working at Mirantis as Global Field CTO. He’s focused on helping customers designing, building, and running their initiatives on Edge, AI and Platform Engineering. He wore many hats in the... Show more

Pavan Madduri is a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at W.W. Grainger, a CNCF Golden Kubestronaut, and an IEEE Senior Member. Specializing in AI infrastructure and enterprise cloud-native architecture, he builds GPU autoscaling and zero-trust environments for large-scale AI workloads.

Pavan is the creator of the open-source keda-gpu-scaler and an active architectural contributor to core CNCF projects, including Volcano (GPU NUMA-aware scheduling) and Dragonfly (AI model distribution). In addition to his open-source work, he serves as an independent observability and telemetry advisor for commercial AI startups.

As a recognized industry voice on LLMOps, he frequently publishes technical frameworks in trade media such as VKTR, Techstrong, and CNCF.io, and is the author of the upcoming book Agentic AIOps. Pavan regularly presents his architectural designs at major industry events, including the BrightTALK App Security Summit, KyvernoCon, and the Kubeflow Community Showcase

Pavan Madduri is a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at W.W. Grainger, a CNCF Golden Kubestronaut, and an IEEE Senior Member. Specializing in AI infrastructure and enterprise cloud-native architecture, he builds GPU autoscaling and zero-trust environmen... Show more

Satyam is an OSS Developer at Devtron, working at the intersection of AI and cloud-native technologies. He is a former member of the Kubernetes release team, serving as Release Notes Lead for v1.32, with experience in release engineering and a Google Summer of Code contributor at openSUSE.

He has spoken at leading conferences, including KubeCon London, KubeCon China, and the openSUSE Summit in Japan and India. A CNCF Ambassador and Kubernetes Community Days New Delhi organizer and he leads Asia’s largest Cloud Native community based in New Delhi, India.

Satyam is an OSS Developer at Devtron, working at the intersection of AI and cloud-native technologies. He is a former member of the Kubernetes release team, serving as Release Notes Lead for v1.32, with experience in release engineering and a Google... Show more

Prasanth Baskar is a Software Engineer and a core contributor to the CNCF Harbor project. loves mentoring new contributors through LFX Mentorship and also an active contributor to kitops, oras, kubernetes. I have spoken at KubeCon, OpenSSF Community day, CNCF Meetups and various foss communities.

Prasanth Baskar is a Software Engineer and a core contributor to the CNCF Harbor project. loves mentoring new contributors through LFX Mentorship and also an active contributor to kitops, oras, kubernetes. I have spoken at KubeCon, OpenSSF Community ... Show more

Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's gone from CTO to IC across operations, AI, cloud, and platform engineering, including time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and Honeywell. His training has reached over a million engineers. He speaks at KubeCon and CNCF on Claude Code, MCP, and AI safety for platform engineers. Tools don't transform organizations. People do.

Michael Forrester is a student, explorer, and educator at the boundary between humanity and technology. Over 25+ years he's gone from CTO to IC across operations, AI, cloud, and platform engineering, including time at AWS, ThoughtWorks, Red Hat, and ... Show more

Sonali Srivastava is a Senior Developer Advocate at Improving, co-chair of KubeCon India 2026, and an organizer at the CNCF Women in Cloud Native Community Group. With over seven years of experience spanning system administration, software development, and developer advocacy, she has established herself as a prominent voice in the open source and cloud-native communities.
Sonali focuses on bridging the gap between developers and CNCF projects by creating POCs for cutting-edge technologies and developing engaging blogs, demos, tutorials, and videos. She is the creator of LFS255: Mastering Kubernetes Security with Kyverno, a comprehensive course hosted by The Linux Foundation.
She has spoken at major conferences, including KubeCon India, SOSS Community Day, KCD Bengaluru, FOSS United Chennai, and Mumbai chapters. She has made significant contributions to the open source project systemd during her Outreachy internship.
Based in Mumbai, India, Sonali welcomes connections from students and caregivers looking to start or restart their careers in technology, embodying her commitment to giving back to the community that has supported her journey. She is dedicated to creating supportive environments for underrepresented groups in technology.

Sonali Srivastava is a Senior Developer Advocate at Improving, co-chair of KubeCon India 2026, and an organizer at the CNCF Women in Cloud Native Community Group. With over seven years of experience spanning system administration, software developmen... Show more

Gantigmaa Selenge is a Senior Software Engineer working on Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka, where she focuses on evolving the Apache Kafka ecosystem into a scalable, high-performance distributed streaming platform. She is a maintainer of the CNCF project Strimzi and an active contributor to the Kafka community. She has presented at Kafka Summit London, KubeCon Europe, Devoxx UK, and StrimziCon.

Gantigmaa Selenge is a Senior Software Engineer working on Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka, where she focuses on evolving the Apache Kafka ecosystem into a scalable, high-performance distributed streaming platform. She is a maintainer of the CNCF pr... Show more

Akshat Sharma is a Open Source Advocate and Mentor and currently serves as Developer Advocate at Deskree, dedicated to building meaningful connections between technology and community.
In 2024, he was selected as one of 1,220 contributors from over thousands of applicants in Google Summer of Code. In 2025,2026 he returned as a mentor guiding contributors in Google Summer of Code 2025, Mifos Summer of Code, and Code for GovTech. His research journey has taken him to the University of California and IIT Indore, and he has authored ten research papers in recent advancements and technology. He has presented his work at prestigious conferences including ICACIS 2023, ICNSBT 2024, C3IT 2024, Interledger Summit 2024,Grpconf 2025, OpenSearchCon Japan 2025, Google Tokyo GSOC Meetup 2025, Fossasia 2026 and so on. Additionally, he regularly attended key industry-leading gatherings such as Open SSF, Open Source Summit India, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India, Pycon India.

Akshat Sharma is a Open Source Advocate and Mentor and currently serves as Developer Advocate at Deskree, dedicated to building meaningful connections between technology and community. In 2024, he was selected as one of 1,220 contributors from over... Show more

Alex Soto is a Developer Advocate at IBM. He is passionate about the Java world and software automation and believes in the open-source software model. Alex is the co-author of Manning and O'Reilly books Testing Java Microservice, Quarkus Cookbook, Kubernetes Secrets Management, GitOps Cookbook, RHCE Ansible Automation Study Guide, Applied AI for Enterprise Java Development, and AI Agents with Java.
A Java Champion since 2017, he is also an international speaker (Devoxx, KubeCon, DevNexus, JavaOne, JavaLand, ...) and teacher at Salle URL University. You can follow him on Twitter (@alexsotob) to stay tuned to what’s happening in Java.

Alex Soto is a Developer Advocate at IBM. He is passionate about the Java world and software automation and believes in the open-source software model. Alex is the co-author of Manning and O'Reilly books Testing Java Microservice, Quarkus Cookbook, K... Show more

Principal Software Engineer in the office of Microsoft Azure's CTO, where he builds Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project for change-driven architectures. Organizer of the official CNCF community group in Seattle.

A CNCF speaker (KubeCon NA 2025) and program committee member for KubeCon India 2026 and KubeCon Japan 2026 (AI + ML track), Aman also mentors students through Google Summer of Code and LFX Mentorship on projects spanning agentic AI, MCP, and IoT.

Aman has a decade of distributed systems experience at LinkedIn and Microsoft - spanning stream processing (Kafka, Samza), cloud migration, and building new Azure services from the ground up. His current work focuses on the intersection of change-driven systems and AI-augmented developer experiences.

Principal Software Engineer in the office of Microsoft Azure's CTO, where he builds Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project for change-driven architectures. Organizer of the official CNCF community group in Seattle. A CNCF speaker (KubeCon NA 2025) and prog... Show more

I’m passionate about almost everything related to Kubernetes, and I’ve worked extensively with GitOps over the past few years 🔄 | Speaker at KubeCon, ArgoCon, KCD, and Cloud Native Denmark 🗣️ | Kubestronaut 🚀

I’m passionate about almost everything related to Kubernetes, and I’ve worked extensively with GitOps over the past few years 🔄 | Speaker at KubeCon, ArgoCon, KCD, and Cloud Native Denmark 🗣️ | Kubestronaut 🚀 Show more

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNatibeCon 2026. She actively contributes to AAIF and CNCF projects. She is the author of “Sidecar-less Istio Explained” and “AI Agents in Kubernetes”, and holds more than 200 patents.

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, co-chair of KubeCon + CloudNatibeCon 2026. She actively contributes to AAIF and CNCF projects. She is the author of “Sidecar-less Istio Explained” and “AI Agents in Kubernetes”, and holds more than 200 paten... Show more

Iain is a Principal Security Consultant at AmberWolf, where he attacks and reviews cloud-native environments. He is also an active member of Kubernetes SIG-Security, and co-lead of the SIG-Security Third-Party Audit working group. Since discovering that public speaking really isn’t that scary, he has presented at various conferences including KubeCon EU and BlackHat. He enjoys playing with new technologies, and if he’s not hacking a Kubernetes cluster or attacking a build pipeline he can be found writing home automations, or baking.

Iain is a Principal Security Consultant at AmberWolf, where he attacks and reviews cloud-native environments. He is also an active member of Kubernetes SIG-Security, and co-lead of the SIG-Security Third-Party Audit working group. Since discovering t... Show more

Rishi Mondal is a SRE at Obmondo , CNCF KubeStellar Maintainer, and Docker Captain . A Linux Foundation Mentor, GSoC Mentor at CNCF, and OWASP Mentor he uniquely progressed from LFX Mentee to Maintainer to Mentor within a single year. A regular cloud-native speaker at multiple events across Asia . he was personally featured by the CNCF CEO at Kubecon India for community impact . Harvard HPAIR Delegate and LIFT Scholar.

Rishi Mondal is a SRE at Obmondo , CNCF KubeStellar Maintainer, and Docker Captain . A Linux Foundation Mentor, GSoC Mentor at CNCF, and OWASP Mentor he uniquely progressed from LFX Mentee to Maintainer to Mentor within a single year. A regular clou... Show more

With a passion for open source, machine learning, compilers, and natural language processing, she has explored language parsing with Rust and R. She was instrumental in the Kubernetes Release Team for versions 1.17 and 1.18, and has held positions as Shadow Chair and Emeritus-Co-Chair for Kubernetes SIG Docs. Her contributions span Kubernetes, Planout and Ax (Facebook), Google Cloud Platform, and Google APIs. She's been a part of the program committees for Helm Summit 2019, Grace Hopper 2020, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events, and mentored at Grace Hopper OSD 2022.

With a passion for open source, machine learning, compilers, and natural language processing, she has explored language parsing with Rust and R. She was instrumental in the Kubernetes Release Team for versions 1.17 and 1.18, and has held positions ... Show more

Suman is a Solutions Architect at Platform9 systems. He is a consultant and advisor for Kubernetes & Cloud Native Solutions, helping Customers and End users in their application modernisation journey and adoption with DevOps best practices. Suman has been a distinguished speaker and had delivered sessions on Devops, Cloud-Native tools, Kubernetes & Serverless technology at KubeCon India, Open Source Summit, Hashitalks (HashiCorp), Devops India Summit, DockerCon

Suman is a Solutions Architect at Platform9 systems. He is a consultant and advisor for Kubernetes & Cloud Native Solutions, helping Customers and End users in their application modernisation journey and adoption with DevOps best practices. Suman has... Show more

Joe Thompson's IT career is near the end of its third decade. He's been part of the cloud-native community since 2014, starting with OpenStack and taking on Kubernetes a few months after it debuted. He's spoken at KubeCon, Cloud Native Rejekts and many local meetups and enjoys showing how well-known tools and techniques are relevant to new platforms. Currently he's providing Kubernetes expertise to (mostly) public-sector customers as part of the team at Clarity Business Solutions, based in Linthicum, Maryland.

Joe Thompson's IT career is near the end of its third decade. He's been part of the cloud-native community since 2014, starting with OpenStack and taking on Kubernetes a few months after it debuted. He's spoken at KubeCon, Cloud Native Rejekts and ma... Show more

Kennedy is the CTO/Co-Founder at Mitigant, an innovative cloud security startup based in Germany. Kennedy has spent over 12 years in cybersecurity and passionately explores the intersection of security chaos engineering, cyber resilience, incident response, and AI security for cloud security. Kennedy has published over 20 academic papers about several cloud security domains and contributed to the first O'Reilly book on Security Chaos Engineering. He is also a fifth-time member of the AWS Community Builder Program. He has spoken at several international conferences, including InfoQ DevSummit, AWS Community Day DACH, KubeCon (Cloud Native Security Day), NDC {Security}, ChaosCarnival, and BSides Berlin.

Kennedy is the CTO/Co-Founder at Mitigant, an innovative cloud security startup based in Germany. Kennedy has spent over 12 years in cybersecurity and passionately explores the intersection of security chaos engineering, cyber resilience, incident re... Show more

Harshita Varma is a contributor to the Kubernetes project, actively involved in the SIG Contributor Experience community, with a focus on enhancing the contributor journey. She began her open-source journey by contributing to the Thanos project, sparking her passion for open source. In March 2022, she was selected as an LFX mentee for Kubernetes under the CNCF. Since then, Harshita has significantly contributed to Kubernetes, earning the prestigious Dan Kohn Scholarship to attend KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam as an attendee. Currently, she continues to engage with the open-source ecosystem, fostering collaboration and inclusivity within the Kubernetes community.

Harshita Varma is a contributor to the Kubernetes project, actively involved in the SIG Contributor Experience community, with a focus on enhancing the contributor journey. She began her open-source journey by contributing to the Thanos project, spar... Show more

Rohit is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Databricks, leading the Traffic Platform team. He is a core maintainer of Envoy Proxy and one of its top contributors globally, shaping the project through code, security reviews, and design decisions. He is the co-author of Dynamic Modules and many other features in Envoy.

At Databricks, he builds the networking infrastructure that powers data movement at scale. He has spoken at KubeCon and EnvoyCon, sharing work rooted in real production experience.

Rohit is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Databricks, leading the Traffic Platform team. He is a core maintainer of Envoy Proxy and one of its top contributors globally, shaping the project through code, security reviews, and design decisions. He is ... Show more

Steve rescues failed Kubernetes migrations, transforming platform chaos into clarity in 30 days. After saving £100M+ in doomed cloud-native projects and successfully leading 50+ CNCF transformations, he created Platform Fix OS - a systematic approach to platform simplification. Known for his "learn by breaking" philosophy and no-BS take on Kubernetes complexity, Steve delivers the uncomfortable truths vendors won't tell you. His signature talk, "From K8s Chaos to Clarity" has helped thousands of engineers escape the complexity trap. Steve is the straight-talking engineer organisations call when their cloud-native dreams become expensive nightmares. He speaks at KubeCon, DevOps Days, and enterprise summits worldwide, helping teams achieve freedom through radical simplification.

Steve rescues failed Kubernetes migrations, transforming platform chaos into clarity in 30 days. After saving £100M+ in doomed cloud-native projects and successfully leading 50+ CNCF transformations, he created Platform Fix OS - a systematic approach... Show more

Rory is a senior advocate for Datadog who has extensive experience with Cyber security and Cloud native computing. In addition to his work as a security reviewer and architect on containerization technologies like Kubernetes and Docker he has presented at Kubecon EU and NA, as well as a number of other cloud native and security conferences. He is one of the main authors of the CIS benchmarks for Docker and Kubernetes, a published author on the topic of Cloud Native Security and member of Kubernetes SIG-Security. When he's not working, Rory can generally be found out walking and enjoying the scenery of the Scottish highlands.

Rory is a senior advocate for Datadog who has extensive experience with Cyber security and Cloud native computing. In addition to his work as a security reviewer and architect on containerization technologies like Kubernetes and Docker he has present... Show more

Monika Rajput is a Senior Technical Consultant at Ahead, where she helps build real-world data and cloud solutions. Over the years, she’s worked with four early-stage startups, shaping products from idea to launch. Alongside her technical work, she’s passionate about helping others grow in tech. She has mentored over 200+ students and actively contributes to the community as a CNCF Ambassador and organiser of CNCF Gurugram.

Monika is also the founder of TMS: The Monika Rajput Stack, a podcast where she shares stories from the world of data, AI, and cloud, featuring people doing meaningful work in tech. She’s currently serving as a Program Committee Member for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in China, Japan, and India. Her goal is to make technology more open, relatable, and accessible, especially for those who are just getting started.

Monika Rajput is a Senior Technical Consultant at Ahead, where she helps build real-world data and cloud solutions. Over the years, she’s worked with four early-stage startups, shaping products from idea to launch. Alongside her technical work, she’s... Show more

With 16+ years of hands-on cybersecurity leadership across Aerospace, Healthcare, and Financial services, I specialize in securing large-scale cloud platforms, with a strong focus on Azure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architectures.

At RBC, I lead the global Azure and Kubernetes Security program, driving cloud threat research, security architecture, threat modeling, and risk assessments across enterprise-scale designs. I also collaborate closely with Microsoft, Google, and emerging security startups to co-develop innovative cloud security solutions.

As international speaker, I regularly share insights at leading industry conferences including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Cloud Native Security Con, Microsoft Ignite, OWASP, and Azure/GCP Users Groups and CNCF community events.

With 16+ years of hands-on cybersecurity leadership across Aerospace, Healthcare, and Financial services, I specialize in securing large-scale cloud platforms, with a strong focus on Azure, Kubernetes, and cloud-native architectures. At RBC, I lea... Show more

I am a Software engineer on Akamai's managed Kubernetes platform team that works on building an opinionated K8s platform, including autoscaling, GitOps-driven cluster lifecycle, and custom Operators, giving users with a clear golden path to deploy containerized applications.

I'm also interested in the intersection of AI and Infrastructure particularly agentic management of infrastructure itself.

Outside of tech I love to sketch and paint. I also enjoy hiking and playing soccer in my free time.

I am a Software engineer on Akamai's managed Kubernetes platform team that works on building an opinionated K8s platform, including autoscaling, GitOps-driven cluster lifecycle, and custom Operators, giving users with a clear golden path to deploy co... Show more

I am Avin Indrasoma, a software engineering undergraduate from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Currently on a mission to grow and empower vibrant tech communities across the region. I am also a part of the Github Campus Experts program which aims to train and support student leaders to grow their communities.

I am Avin Indrasoma, a software engineering undergraduate from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Currently on a mission to grow and empower vibrant tech communities across the region. I am also a part of the Github Campus Experts program which aims to train and su... Show more

Jos is a Tech Lead with extensive experience helping customers transition to cloud-native solutions and infrastructure. Over the past years, he has guided teams and organizations in adopting DevOps practices and building resilient systems.

Passionate about knowledge sharing and community building Jos has been an active part of the organizing teams for DevOpsDays Amsterdam and Eindhoven, as well as KCD Amsterdam and Utrecht.

Jos is a Tech Lead with extensive experience helping customers transition to cloud-native solutions and infrastructure. Over the past years, he has guided teams and organizations in adopting DevOps practices and building resilient systems. Passion... Show more

I've more than 18 years of experience defining and implementing software architectures by leading
high-performance teams and improving best practices for software development. I help connect people
with technology by bringing value to their businesses. Passionate about cloud computing, Kubernetes, AI,
and distributed systems. I have presented as a speaker at several events, including KubeCon, KCD NY, OSS, and others.
I am Project Maintainer for Kubeflow.

I've more than 18 years of experience defining and implementing software architectures by leading high-performance teams and improving best practices for software development. I help connect people with technology by bringing value to their busines... Show more

I have been a cloud engineer for the last 10 years. Working in Golang for the last 7. Before that I was a web developer. I have spoken at Kubecon, Djangocon.Eu and EuroPython as well as many times at local techie groups, including my local Golang meetup.
Currently I spend my time developing microservices for EDB's cross cloud or appliance Postgres AI product. Plus eval and tuning of its agentic command system.
A Sovereign AI and Analytics platform built on Postgres (EDB is the #1 Postgres open source contributor).
I am interested in improving DevX for the full lifecycle of Go microservices.

I have been a cloud engineer for the last 10 years. Working in Golang for the last 7. Before that I was a web developer. I have spoken at Kubecon, Djangocon.Eu and EuroPython as well as many times at local techie groups, including my local Golang me... Show more

Jiahang Xu is a System Architect at China Merchants Bank. He has over 15 years of unique cross-domain experience working in telecom, automotive, financial industry, startup as a co-founder, and KubeVela maintainer. He's mainly focused on cloud-native application technology practice in recent years. He is seasoned in the cloud native system for GenAI and is responsible for building large-scale financial platform engineering for China Merchants Bank.

Jiahang Xu is a System Architect at China Merchants Bank. He has over 15 years of unique cross-domain experience working in telecom, automotive, financial industry, startup as a co-founder, and KubeVela maintainer. He's mainly focused on cloud-native... Show more