2024 Awards

2024 Contributor Award Recipients

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

API Machinery

Marek Siarkowicz, @serathius
Marek’s contributions to the Consistent Reads from Cache project over the past few years have been truly inspiring. This initiative required deep expertise in both etcd and Kubernetes, coupled with a steadfast determination to see it through to completion. Marek’s work has led to one of the most significant scalability improvements in recent years. Without his dedication and skill, this achievement would not have been possible.

Lukasz Szaszkiewicz, @polynomial
@polynomial for his work on streaming lists. It’s been a long road producing new API mechanics, designing drop-in compatible clients to leverage the new construct, and building new feature gating mechanisms to control enablement. Great job making a feature in a way that our ecosystem can adopt.

Architecture

Stephen Heywood, @heyste
For outstanding dedication and exceptional long term contributions to the Kubernetes Conformance Program

CLI

Maciej Szulik, @soltysh
Maciej spends significant amount of time to review all PRs, KEPs in sig-cli and one of the key persons for the progress.

Cluster Lifecycle

Fan Baofa, @carlory
Various kubeadm contributions. becoming a reviewer of the project.

Christian Schlotter, @chrischdi
Various contributions to Cluster API and Cluster API vSphere provider. acting as reviewer and approver of the projects.

Max Gautier, @VannTen
Various contributions to kubespray: support for installing helm charts, CI improvements, bootstrap-os refactoring, fine grained OS packages installation, cleanup of PodSecurityPolicy support, others.

Contributor Experience

Jason Braganza, @jasonbraganza
For single-handedly holding the fort of Kubernetes New Org Memberships for close to a year now. Jason has demonstrated exceptional diligence, thoroughness, care and compassion in reviewing NMC requests, consistently flagging issues and initiating discussions for careful decision-making, and our GitHub org is safer for it. Thank you, Jason!

Mario Fahlandt, @mfahlandt
For tackling important technical challenges for the Comms & LWKD teams and for leading KCSNA 2024.

Sreeram Venkitesh, @sreeram-venkitesh
For boosting so many messages both to and about our contributors, and taking on and mastering many new comms tasks.

Noah Kantrowitz, @coderanger
For doing all the little tasks to keep contributor systems running.

Sandeep Kanabar, @sandeepkanabar*
For outstanding contributions to the KCS and SIG ContribEx Comms teams. Sandeep went above and beyond to pick up tasks and learn to lead comms as a shadow for KCSNA24.

Arvind Parekh, @ArvindParekh*
For outstanding contributions to the KCS and SIG ContribEx Comms teams. Arvind went above and beyond to pick up tasks and learn to lead comms as a shadow for KCSNA24.

Docs

Dipesh Rawat, @dipesh-rawat
For his awesome journey in advancing through the SIG Docs contributor ladder, where he has now become a regular approver and reviewer for the Kubernetes Documentation community. His expertise in web development and localization, alongside his great application of the Kubernetes documentation guidelines for other SIGs, has been exemplary for those wishing to become leaders in the project.

Abigail McCarthy, @a-mccarthy
For her stewardship of the Localization subproject, where she has been able to guide new language teams and improve processes for existing teams. SIG Docs leads have been able to let the Localization subproject run independently thanks to the leadership of Abbie and her co-owner, Seokho. She has set a high bar for leadership across SIG Docs for current and promising subproject owners.

SIG etcd

Ivan Valdes, @ivanvc
Ivan has been extremely active across a number of etcd-io subprojects since getting involved with the project 12 months ago at our ContribFest in Chicago in November 2023 and has helped take sig-etcd tooling to another level. Ivan adding to your code & review contributions we are deeply appreciative of your focus on helping other community members and being active in our regular community and triage meetings, thank you for all your hard work.

Siyuan Zhang, @siyuanfoundation
Siyuan has been making crucial contributions to some of our most important roadmap items for etcd, both within the etcd-io repository but also across a number of kubernetes subprojects relating to etcd. Siyuan the amount of progress you’ve contributed towards etcd 3.6 since your first pr just over a year ago is extraordinary. Thank you for your help towards making etcd 3.6 a reality and helping to bridge the divide between Kubernetes and etcd. Your efforts on livez/readyz, downgrades and etcd feature gates are making a huge difference.

Wei Fu, @fuweid
Fu Wei has demonstrated extraordinary knowledge in crucial areas of etcd and bbolt. They were instrumental in landing etcd’s extremely complex upgrade from grpc gateway from v1 to v2 and creating our new robustness testing suite for bbolt.

Instrumentation

Catherine Fang, @catherineF-dev
Catherine has easily been one of the most prominent contributors in Kube State Metrics since her involvement from the v2.6.0 release (August, 2022). Since then, she has not only unblocked us on various fronts by contributing crucial patches, but also been an excellent all-rounder, keeping the tooling and documentation in shape, as well as actively seeking out issues that affect the community, and addressing them timely. She has helped out with 204 pull request to date, while driving 34 pull requests of her own.

Manuel Rüger, @mrueg
Manuel has landed 144 pull requests to date, with patothes entailing major features, as well as keeping the release machineTV in shape which enabled him to deliver new releases ofn time. He has been active in the project since v1.5.0 (January, 2019), and been a major help ever since (involved in reviewing ~555 pull requests) Kube State Metrics could never have gotten to the pedestal which it is on today without his efforts.

K8s Infra

Ricky Sandowski, @rjsadow
Drive an huge effort to migrate our prowjobs to the community infrastructure

Marko Mudrinić, @xmudrii
Ensure a transparent and robust integration between our CI and AWS.

Multicluster

Mike Morris, @mikemorris
For significant contributions to shaping both the Multi-Cluster Service API and the new Cluster Inventory project, and for being a consistently active participant in the sig-multicluster community.

Network

Quan Tian, @tnqn
Quan made a bunch of great contributions this year, and was added as a reviewer. We really appreciate him jumping in to help, and look forward to continuing to work with him. Thank you Quan!

Daman Arora, @aroradaman
Daman came from the KPNG project over to core to help out with in-tree kube-proxy, and has been deeply involved in the maintenance and future direction ever since. Thank you Daman!

Maciej Skrocki, @mskrocki
As a sub-project lead Maciej has been tirelessly pushing forward the multi-network sub-project for a couple of years now, and we want to recognize him for his dedication as we expect many will benefit from this work in the coming years. Thank you Maciej!

Dave Protasowski, @dprotaso
Dave has been a prolific contributor to the Gateway API sub-project. Not only does he have a lot of commits in the main repository, but he’s also been personally involved (and commonly drives) on many of our Gateway API enhancement proposals. Thank you for your dedication Dave!

Node

Peter Hunt, @haircommander
In recognition of your longstanding contributions and unwavering commitment to continuous improvement initiatives.

Francesco Romani, @ffromani
In recognition of prolonged contributions in the domain of resource management, unwavering commitment, and persistent endeavors towards continuous enhancements.

Release

Meha Bhalodiya, @mehabhalodiya
We would like to recognize Meha for her work as a branch manager. Meha has been very hands on with all of the release cut activities and has been very proactive with communication across multiple timezones and goes out of her way to offer to share her knowledge.

Vyom Yadav, @Vyom-Yadav
Vyom has gone above and beyond in supporting the new Release Signal sub team over the last few releases. Thank you for your dedication, Vyom.

Scalability

Harish Kuna, @hakuna-matatah
Harish helped ramp up Kubernetes scalability testing on AWS to 5000-node cluster by working closely with SIG testing. This helps distribute the cost of scale-testing and the responsibility of ensuring scalability readiness of Kubernetes releases across cloud providers. He also strives to maintain the health of these jobs and improve test coverage.

Prateek Gogia, @prateekgogia
Prateek played a foundational role in enabling scalability tests on AWS by ensuring the right capabilities/configurations are in place with our tooling (kops, test-infra).

Justin Santa Barbara, @justinsb
Prateek played a foundational role in enabling scalability tests on AWS by ensuring the right capabilities/configurations are in place with our tooling (kops, test-infra).

Scheduling

Sheng Zhan, @AxeZhan
For working on several important features, refactors and bug fixes around scale and for being an active participant in SIG discussions.

Security

Anshuman Tripathi, @AnshumanTripathi
For tenacious curiosity: researching the most obscure kube-scheduler arcana and writing it up in a way that never existed before. Because of your work, we have all levelled up.Thank you for learning and working in community so we all benefit!

Ala Dewberry, @aladewberry
For excellent leadership of Self Assessments: teaching people and SIGs to create security threat models for themselves, and attracting new contributors along the way. Your ambition and enthusiasm to take on the subproject lead role and learn by doing is an example for us all.

Storage

Baofa Fan, @carlory
Baofa is a relatively new contributor in SIG Storage. He has made lots of contributions since he started to contribute to SIG Storage in K8s 1.28 release. He has helped with CSI sidecar releases, adding e2e tests, fixing bugs, doing code cleanup, and helped with development for multiple features, including Non-Graceful Node Shutdown, Volume Attributes Class, Always Honor Reclaim Policy, CSI Migration, etc. At the time of this writing, he has authored more than 100 PRs. He has also been helping with reviews and contributing to other SIGs including sig-testing and sig-scheduling.

Raunak Shah, @RaunakShah
Raunak has been contributing to SIG Storage for a while. He has helped with CSI sidecar releases, fixing bugs, and adding e2e tests. He designed and implemented a feature that addressed a potential security problem by preventing unauthorized volume mode conversion and eventually moved it to GA. He also made major contributions in bringing the VolumeGroupSnapshot feature to Alpha.

Windows

Ritika Gupta, @ritikaguptams
Ritika has been a tremendous help in migrating the SIG-Windows test passes to the community infra clusters!