CNCF Announces 2023 Community Awards: Recognizing Exceptional Contributors to the Cloud Native Ecosystem

In a ceremony held at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) celebrated the seventh annual Community Awards. These accolades honor individuals and organizations that have gone above and beyond in their advocacy, contributions, and leadership within the cloud native ecosystem.

The CNCF community is a vital force behind the success of cloud native technology, with over 800 members and more than 219,000 contributors collaborating on 173 projects. Chris Aniszczyk, CTO at CNCF, expressed his gratitude to the community, stating, "The cloud native ecosystem wouldn't function without the dedication of its open source contributors."

This year's awards were presented in four categories: Top Committer, Chop Wood Carry Water, Top Documentarian, and two new categories: TAGGIE and Tiny but Mighty. The winners were selected by CNCF staff and the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), based on nominations from the community.

Akihiro Suda, a Software Engineer and maintainer of several projects like containerd and Lima, was named the Top Committer for his significant technical contributions to CNCF and its hosted projects. Divya Mohan, a tech evangelist and Kubernetes maintainer, received the Top Documentarian award for her exceptional documentation work on various projects.

The Chop Wood Carry Water awards were presented to community members who have dedicated countless hours to open source projects and building community meetups. Kaslin Fields, a developer advocate and co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast, and Faseela Dilshan, a cloud native software developer and Istio Steering Committee member, were among the recipients. Arnaud Meukam, a software engineer and Kubernetes maintainer, Lin Sun, a director of open source and Istio TOC and Steering Committee member, Rajas Kakodkar, a senior software engineer and CNCF's TAG Runtime tech lead, also received this award for their behind-the-scenes contributions.

Catherine Paganini, co-chair for the TAG Contributor Strategy and CNCF Business Value Subcommittees, as well as co-maintainer of the Cloud Native Glossary, was presented with the TAGGIE award for her significant impact on advancing CNCF's Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs).

The Tiny but Mighty award went to Weaveworks, a company that empowers teams to build, automate, secure, and manage cloud native infrastructure and applications at scale. As one of the first CNCF members, they have been instrumental in driving the GitOps movement and contributing to several open source projects, including Flux, Flagger, Cortex, OpenGitOps, and more.

Previous Community Awards recipients include Aeva Black, Alex Chircop, Anaïs Urlichs, Ben Elder, Bridget Kromhout, Carlos Panato, Carolyn Van Slyck, Emily Fox, Erin Boyd, Josh Berkus, Matt Fisher, Nikhita Raghunath, Richard Hartmann, Tasha Drew, and Tim Bannister.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a nonprofit organization that builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software. It hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy, and brings together industry leaders to support the adoption and innovation of cloud native technologies. For more information, visit www.cncf.io.