2025 Awards

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

API Machinery

Aaron Prindle, @aaron-prindle
Aaron has been a driving force behind the new declarative validation framework in Kubernetes. His leadership and technical contributions to KEP-5073, which introduces validation-gen, have been instrumental in moving Kubernetes API validation from complex, handwritten Go code to a more maintainable and author-friendly declarative model. Over the last year, Aaron’s work has established the foundational infrastructure for this transition, including the creation of the validation-gen code generator. This work significantly lowers the barrier for new contributors and improves the overall quality and consistency of the Kubernetes API, making it a more robust and accessible project for the entire community.

Joel Speed, @JoelSpeed
We are pleased to nominate Joel Speed for his valuable contributions to the kube-api-linter project. This tool is essential for ensuring the quality and consistency of Kubernetes-style APIs, and Joel’s recent work has been vital to its continued improvement. His contributions over the last year have helped enhance the linter’s capabilities, making it easier for developers to identify and correct issues in their custom resources and controllers. Joel’s dedication to improving the tooling around API development demonstrates a strong commitment to the health of the broader Kubernetes ecosystem and helps developers build better, more reliable extensions for Kubernetes.

Yongrui Lin, @yongruilin
We nominate Yongrui for his significant and detailed contributions to the implementation of declarative validation in Kubernetes. Working closely on KEP-5073, Yongrui has been pivotal in the hands-on development and refinement of the validation-gen tool and its integration into the Kubernetes codebase. His numerous commits over the past 12 months reflect a deep commitment to improving the API validation process. Yongrui’s technical diligence and collaborative efforts have been crucial in turning the vision of a declarative validation system into a tangible reality, directly impacting the future maintainability and stability of the Kubernetes API.

Architecture

Patrick Ohly, @pohly
Tireless and extraordinary efforts to bring DRA to GA over several years.

Auth

Taahir Ahmed, @ahmedtd
Significant contributions to Kubernetes certificate trust distribution and issuance to pods.

Standa Láznička, @stlaz
Significant contributions to Kubernetes image pull security.

Harshal Neelkamal, @HarshalNeelkamal
Significant contributions to Kubernetes external service account token signing.

Autoscaling

Adrian Moisey, @adrianmoisey
Outstanding project maintainer (VPA) and Kubernaut omnivore.

Omer Aplatony, @omerap12
Outstanding project maintainer (VPA) and HPA resurrector.

Cluster Lifecycle

Bing Hongtao, @HirazawaUi
HirazawaUi has excelled at being a new kubeadm contributor for SIG Cluster Lifecycle. HirazawaUi climbed the contributor ladder of being first a reviewer and then an approver very fast, while actively reviewing new PRs and participating in important discussions.

Takuma Shibuya, @sivchari
We are happy to use this opportunity to recognize Takuma for being always available to help and for the impact he made in the Cluster API project.

Contributor Experience

Arpit Agrawal, @Hii-Arpit
Arpit has been meaningfully contributing to the Contributor Comms team for years now. This year, he has particularly stepped up to explore running his own video project. He’s created a variety of types of content and built on what he’s learned to help others by presenting the New Contributor Orientation content at local community events. Thank you, Arpit, for your contributions to the community!

Sayak Mukhopadhyay, @SayakMukhopadhyay
For driving the long-overdue Hugo/Docsy upgrade on the Kubernetes contributor site and fixing local website previews to improve the contributor workflow.

Docs

Sayak Mukhopadhyay, @SayakMukhopadhyay
For his excellent work in aligning the Kubernetes website with upstream Docsy, which has required continuous refactors and upgrades. Sayak’s expertise has been extremely needed to make our documentation more robust, and he has proceeded whilst ensuring we’re on the latest environment and dependency versions, all while continuing to support our docs throughout the constant changes we experience during each release cycle.

Graziano Casto, @graz-dev
For his helpful work on the Kubernetes Blog, which has led him to become a co-maintainer of our blog in a helpful, efficient, and kind manner. Graziano’s reviews for authors are well-received, and he has generally mastered our blog guidelines to become a definitive authority within our small SIG Docs Blog team, which was sorely needed. We’re incredibly grateful for Graziano’s step-up into blog maintainer for the SIG.

SIG etcd

Joshua James, @joshjms
Joshua documented the process for bumping etcd versions in Kubernetes, has been working toward unifying etcd image management in Kubernetes, and has contributed to various project chores such as release and dependency updates.

Nont Thanonchai, @nwnt
Nont’s work has been critical to improving etcd’s robustness and correctness. As the primary contributor behind the Antithesis testing effort, he helped uncover serious issues—including a bug where a watch on a future revision could receive past events. His focus on discovering subtle, complex problems has had a lasting positive impact on etcd’s reliability.

Instrumentation

Yongrui Lin, @yongruilin
Yongrui is recognized again, this time by SIG Instrumentation, for his careful work fixing critical bugs, improving documentation, and strengthening tests across instrumentation features. His diligence has improved both stability and clarity for users of Kubernetes observability components.

Network

Surya Seetharaman, @tssurya
Surya has been a key contributor to SIG Network for many years. Her design work and leadership around Network Policy, both technically and within the community, are a major reason the feature stands where it does today. Her sustained commitment and expertise have been central to the SIG’s success.

Adrian Moisey, @adrianmoisey
Adrian has recently become a driving force within SIG Network, bringing fresh energy and a willingness to dive into some of the hardest problems in core networking. His enthusiasm and work on complex issues have energized the community and moved important efforts forward.

Lionel Jouin, @LionelJouin
Lionel has spent years pushing the boundaries of what Kubernetes networking can do. His constant exploration of new ideas and innovative approaches has helped the SIG grow and evolve, lifting the entire community’s ambitions along the way.

Node

Tim Allclair, @tallclair
Tim is recognized for his substantial contributions to the In-Place Resize beta as well as many other initiatives over the years. His long-standing dedication to SIG Node has had a meaningful impact across the project.

Bing Hongtao, @HirazawaUi
Bing is also celebrated by SIG Node for his work fixing critical bugs, building new features, and driving testing for evented PLEG to evaluate its viability. His efforts have directly improved Kubernetes node reliability and feature velocity.

Kevin Hannon, @kannon92
Kevin has been instrumental in developing and maintaining SIG Node’s test infrastructure, carefully shepherding KEPs, and contributing across a wide range of initiatives. His broad, dependable contributions make a big difference to the SIG’s ability to move forward confidently.

Release

Matteo Bianchi, @mbianchidev
Matteo has gone above and beyond as a Release Branch Manager. He significantly improved and streamlined Release Engineering documentation, created detailed technical checklists, and successfully shepherded another release cut on a tight schedule. His continued efforts keep the release process smoother and more predictable.

Scalability

Alay Patel, @alaypatel07
Alay was key to building scalability tests for Dynamic Resource Allocation, ensuring that DRA could reach GA with confidence in Kubernetes 1.34. His work helps guarantee that new features meet the scale and reliability expectations of large deployments.

Scheduling

David Grove, @dgrove-oss
David has delivered impactful improvements in Kueue to address real-world issues. He led KEP-3589, which gives cluster admins better control over Kueue’s management namespace, and KEP-2937, which makes resource transformations configurable and lays the groundwork for more flexible workload estimation. His efforts have significantly expanded Kueue’s capabilities.

Jiang Zhenyu (CY Jiang), @googs1025
CY Jiang has made numerous contributions to the Kubernetes scheduler and has also been active in related projects such as descheduler and scheduler-plugins. His steady stream of improvements across these components has been invaluable to SIG Scheduling.

Storage

Drew Sirenko, @AndrewSirenko
Drew Sirenko has been a key contributor to the VolumeAttributesClass feature, developing and refining it through comprehensive end-to-end testing and diligent bug fixes, significantly enhancing its stability and functionality. He has also supported Kubernetes CSI sidecar releases, addressing and resolving bugs to improve the reliability of Kubernetes Storage.

Sunny Song, @sunnylovestiramisu
Sunny has led the design and implementation of the VolumeAttributesClass feature, a major enhancement targeted for GA in Kubernetes 1.34, coordinating with multiple cloud providers and storage vendors. She was also instrumental in bringing volume populators to GA in Kubernetes 1.33. In addition, she continues to support CSI sidecar releases and tackle important bug fixes, further strengthening Kubernetes storage capabilities.

WG etcd-operator

Arka Saha, @ArkaSaha30 Arka has led the development of the key feature for etcd-operator version 0.2, certificate management, and has continued mentoring security feature development.

Abdur Rehman, @abdurrehman107 Abdur launched the E2E test suite for etcd-operator, enabling the first release of the operator as well as anchoring future test work.