2023 Awards

2023 Contributor Award Recipients

By Special Interest Group (SIG) with listed message/nomination reason

API Machinery

Mike Spreitzer, @MikeSpreitzer
For his continued contributions and relentless effort in designing, leading, implementing, and refining priority and fairness for the kube-apiserver.

Jeffrey Ying, @Jefftree
For his design and implementation work for aggregated discovery which improves all discovering clients for his design and implementation work for aggregated discovery which improves all discovering REST clients.

Apps

Michał Woźniak, @mimowo
Michał has been consistently contributing improvements and fixes to the job controller to improve its usage in various batch workloads.

Filip Křepinský, @atiratree
Filip has been consistently helpful in various tasks throughout the SIG Apps portfolio. He’s working hard to promote several features forward, is putting a lot of effort into reviewing PRs across the board and finally he’s always helpful and open to other community members.

Architecture

Wojciech Tyczynski, @wojtek-t
wojtek has been on point and taking really good care of ongoing business for reviewing PRR(s) for a while now. The PRR program is extremely important to ensure that we as a community spend enough time thinking about readiness of new enhancements being proposed and how it will affect the millions of workloads/users that will need to update to newer versions we roll out.

Mark Rossetti, @marosset
Github project for K8s enhancement tracking.

Grace Nguyen, @gracenng
Github project for K8s enhancement tracking.

Priyanka Saggu, @Priyankasaggu11929
Github project for K8s enhancement tracking.

Autoscaling

Kensei Nakada, @sanposhiho
“Kensei picked up a feature which had languished in alpha for an extended period (container resource metrics autoscaling), and drove the work required to graduate it to beta. This included significant improvements in the observability of the HPA controller metrics for all users, not just for adopters of the new functionality. Their hard work was entirely responsible for this feature making it to beta, and being in a position to be graduated to stable in the near future, despite not having worked with SIG Autoscaling before. Kensei’s work here was a glowing example of seeing a problem and proactively solving it for all users of k8s.”

CLI

Marly Puckett, @mpuckett159
Marly has been helping with SIG-CLI for several months, tackling almost impossible problems (like jsonpath support for config, kuberc among many others). For the past several months she’s also been active and recently taking over leading our monthly bug scrubs.

Yugo Kobayashi, @koba1t
Yugo volunteered for our Kustomize training cohort a few months back. Since then he’s been actively helping answer questions, fixing bugs and being a great community member. Recently, he was also promoted to be one of the kustomize maintainer.

Cloud Provider

Joel Speed, @JoelSpeed
Joel has dug into complex problems to create workable cross-provider solutions, and always writes clear and thorough issues and explanations.

Cluster Lifecycle

Michael McCune, @elmiko
Mike embodies the heart and soul of the Cluster API community, he is a wonderful host of many of our meetings, and the tireless driving force behind many initiatives and discussions

Killian Muldoon, @killianmuldoon
Killian deserves this nomination for his tireless work to improve and stabilize the project’s E2E tests, creating a solid foundation for implementing exciting new features in the upcoming releases

Joe Kratzat, @joekr
Joe led the Cluster API release team for V1.5.0 to ship an awesome release and set the bar for being a great mentor and a model for all the contributors involved in this effort. Well done!

Furkat Gofurov, @furkatgofurov7
Furkat is leading the release team for Cluster API v1.6.0 with energy and passion, consistently improving the project’s release machinery while mentoring and empowering all the contributors involved in this effort

Contributor Experience

Avinesh Tripathi, @AvineshTripathi
For outstanding contributions to the Contributor Comms Team

Chris Short, @chris-short
For your enthusiastic and tenacious support of comms across the Kubernetes Project

Nigel Brown, @pnbrown
Doing (and then automating!) the invisible work that keeps the project going.

Frederico Muñoz, @fsmunoz
For being an absolute boss of a Comms blogging lead and showing us all how coordinating many projects and contributors at once is done.

Docs

Mauren Berti, @stormqueen1990
For their leadership of the Portuguese localization of Kubernetes docs, and their contributions to improving the localization process for all teams and languages

Nate Waddington, @nate-double-u
For their mentorship across release docs tasks and reviews to help with the Kubernetes Blog

Instrumentation

Richa Banker, @Richabanker
Richa has made significant contributions to SIG Instrumentation, driving forward the Component SLI KEP as well as Kubelet Resource Metrics (not to mention her cross-SIG activity in API-Machinery via work on the MVP KEP).

K8s Infra

Mahamed Ali, @upodroid
Mahamed has been a machine (see his github profile image!) churning out stuff to help us in sig-k8s-infra enabling us to stand up and use both existing infrastructure based on GCP and new infra we have been standing up on AWS. Helping out with kops based harness(es) and chipping away on arm64 test suites as well. His knowledge of our infra is remarkable and has helped us immensely.

Marko Mudrinić, @xmudrii
Marko has been an outstanding asset in standing up new infrastructure using our new AWS credits. He has been a liaison with sig-release as well, working on really difficult problems in both spaces. How best to deploy/maintain the infra as well as use it efficiently and frugally. With his guidance we have been able to move release artifacts over to our fastly CDN as well (after building them on OBS).

Ricky Sandowski, @rjsadow
Ricky is a role model for how to engage with the community, building trust, digging deep, learning things and ramping up quickly. Ricky has helped with moving test CI jobs over to new infrastructure, making sure they are healthy, keeping track of how far we got and encouraging others as well in the mission.

Network

Rob Scott, @robscott
Rob has been essential to the success of Gateway API, helping to found it and working tirelessly in the years since to bring it to GA. Without Rob this year’s GA release wouldn’t have been possible, and we deeply appreciate his contributions!

Nick Young, @youngnick
Nick has been critical to the development of Gateway API, and his efforts have led it to be the vibrant and successful community project that it is today. We greatly appreciate the long hours spent meticulously building Gateway API, and helping to shape the future of Kubernetes!

Lars Ekman, @uablrek
Lars is always present, highly technical and knowledgeable and is often found deep in the Kubernetes machinery. He is crucial to keeping the deeper technical parts of Kubernetes moving forward. Lars’ contributions and his commitment to the community is profoundly appreciated!

Dan Winship, @danwinship
Dan’s deep insights and technical expertise are foundational for Kubernetes. Dan is both a contributor to the code, and a mentor to us all. We appreciate the tremendous impact he has on the community and the technology!

Andrew Stoycos, @astoycos
Andrew has had a profound impact on Kubernetes: He’s worked on many different projects throughout the community (including his tireless efforts on Network Policy) but is also a benefactor to all those in need. We are extremely thankful to have him building the tech while always supporting others along the way!

Node

Ed Bartosh, @bart0sh
For the tireless and continuous pull request reviews and triage for SIG Node

Paco Xu, @pacoxu
For continuous contributions to SIG Node and representing SIG Node at KubeCon China 2023

Release

Marko Mudrinić, @xmudrii
We would like to recognize Marko for his work migrating the Kubernetes release process to the use of the Open Build Service for producing deb and rpm packages. The release process had a long-standing dependency on Google for final publishing and signing of deb and rpm packages, which over time became a risk to the continued release cadence of the project. Marko led a proof of concept of this new capability, worked to integrate it seemlessly into our release process, and coordinated communications for an accelerated cutover away from the Google produced packages. We now produce and distribute packages using only community managed infrastructure and are closer to relying only on community managed infrastructure within the project.

Kat Cosgrove, @katcosgrove
“We would like to recognize Kat Cosgrove, for her work on the Release Team since Kubernetes v1.23, and for her collaboration across multiple SIGs within the Kubernetes community. In particular, we’d like to highlight Kat’s outstanding work during the v1.28 release cycle. The Release Team is responsible for synthesizing inputs across multiple community groups to ensure that we can ship a high-quality and on-time release to our users. Kat noticed a gap in our reporting, escalated the issue, and then stepped up to help manage that section’s responsibilities in close partnership with our friends in SIG Docs to ensure we could release. Her consistency and follow-through in being an active participant in the release retrospectives, filing her findings, and improving process documentation for the Release Team should help to ensure that we can better manage release status reporting for all of our releases to come!”

Security

Rey Lejano, @reylejano
For the third-party audit, especially the post-audit follow-up, and so many other things across SIGs

Ashish Malik, @ashish493
For detailed and and collaborative work on the SIG Security Docs hardening guide

Kris Nóva, @krisnova
For so much Kubernetes security work, especially work that was done anonymously or was uncredited. We see you, we love you, and we miss you

Scheduling

Shiming Zhang, @wzshiming
Shiming is co-founder of the Kubernetes sub-project KWOK, which has garnered immense popularity as a toolkit for rapidly simulating Kubernetes clusters with thousands of nodes in just seconds. His dedication to this project has played a pivotal role in elevating its status within the community. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to him for his tremendous contributions to our community.

Yuki Iwai, @tenzen-y
For becoming a maintainer of the Kueue subproject, after multiple contributions in code, designs and reviews.

Storage

Humble Devassy Chirammal, @humblec
Humble Devassy Chirammal introduced the alpha feature NodeExpandSecret in Kubernetes 1.25 and moved it to beta in the 1.27 release, and is now working on moving it to GA in the 1.29 release. He has been a maintainer for Ceph RBD and CephFS in-tree plugins and announced the deprecation of them in 1.28 while advising users to move to CSI drivers. He has been helping with various bug fixes in SIG Storage and doing work to facilitate the CSI sidecar releases. He also signed up for the mentoring program and guided mentees with upstream contributions in SIG Storage.

Ben Swartzlander, @bswartz
Ben Swartzlander originally introduced the Volume Populators alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.18 release, redesigned it in1.22, and moved it to beta in 1.24 release. As an approver of the CSI spec, he has been providing thoughtful feedback to various features getting added to CSI. He contributed to design discussions of many SIG Storage features and has been an active participant in the Kubernetes Data Protection WG.

Testing

Mahamed Ali, @upodroid
For consistent, cross-SIG work and communication to improve K8s testing and its reliability.

Davanum Srinivas, @dims
For consistent, cross-SIG work and communication to improve K8s testing and its reliability.

Windows

Daman Arora, @aroradaman
Daman has done a tremendous amount of work fixing low level windows-service-proxy bugs and testing it on different provider infrastructures, to help prove out, as a POC an out-of-tree implementation of the Windows Kernelspace proxy. This has the potential to make windows networking easier to reason about and maintain.

Tatenda Zifundi, @tzifudzi
Tatenda has lead the operational-readiness improvements and standardization for sig-windows over the last quarter. He has worked on behalf of his company to build a brighter and more transparent future for Kubernetes on Windows, defining what it means to be a Windows cluster for sig-windows, and the broader community at large. This will give us a more uniform and consistent set of user expectations for K8s users on different OS’s in the future.

Kulwant Singh, @KlwntSingh
Kulwant has led the storage and webhook aspects of making windows e2e tests perform consistently across multiple clouds as part of his commitment to working with the windows operational-readiness team towards the standardization of the definition of Kubernetes on Windows, without his efforts, our broader windows standardization goals would be hard, if not impossible, to achieve.