CNCF Celebrates Innovators Advancing Cloud Native at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe

Recipients are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the cloud native ecosystem and community

Key Highlights

• CNCF announced the winners of the CNCF Community Awards at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026.
• The awards recognize key contributors across projects and Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs), whose work is instrumental in driving innovation and solving critical cloud native challenges, including the efficient and secure scaling of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
• Winners were recognized during an award ceremony at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam.

AMSTERDAM, March 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON EUROPE – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation^® (CNCF^®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the winners of the CNCF Community Awards at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.

The CNCF Community Awards recognizes key contributors across CNCF projects and Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs). These awards celebrate those who have committed their time and efforts to shaping the cloud native ecosystem. Winners were recognized and received their trophies during the event's award ceremony.

"These award recipients are the developers and community members driving cloud native forward," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. "Their innovative work, from mentorships involving LLM fine-tuning to end user contributions, shows how the whole community works together to advance cloud native. We are proud to acknowledge and honor their efforts."

Outstanding Mentor

The Outstanding Mentor Award celebrates contributions to mentorship and community growth. CNCF recognizes Hung-Ying (Hydai) Tai, R&D manager at Second State for his exceptional mentorship within the LFX Mentorship program. His work as a maintainer for WasmEdge has been instrumental in guiding dozens of mentees through critical cloud native projects, ranging from WASI-NN implementations to LLM fine-tuning and compiler optimizations. Learn more about their mentorship history here.

TAGGIE

The TAGGIE award is a key recognition within the CNCF Community Awards, given to individuals who have done the most to advance the CNCF TAGs. This award celebrates those contributors whose efforts are instrumental in scaling contributions from the technical and user community while ensuring the integrity and quality necessary to make cloud native ubiquitous.

This event's winners are:

• Yoshiyuki Tabata (y-tabata)
• Brandt Keller (brandtkeller)
• Josh Gavant (joshgav)
• Carol Valencia (krol3)
• Dylan Page (GenPage)

Top End User Winner

The 2026 Top End User Award winner is SNCF for its large-scale cloud migration and innovative private cloud strategy, which uses Kubernetes as a unified abstraction layer across public and private environments. SNCF modernized infrastructure by migrating 70% of 2,000 applications to the cloud, utilizing Kubernetes as a consistent control plane across 200+ AWS and Azure clusters. To maintain data sovereignty for on-premise workloads, they built a private cloud using OpenStack, providing public cloud parity, full automation and operational control on a high-performance, open source platform.

SNCF presented their case study on Wednesday, 25 March.

The Top End User Award will now be presented annually rather than biannually, ensuring that the community can celebrate the most significant and lasting contributions to the CNCF End User Community.

End User Case Study Contest Winner

The End User Case Study Contest winner is Saxo Bank, recognized for extending GitOps and declarative automation beyond containerized workloads using Kubernetes and CNCF technologies. Saxo Bank resolved onboarding challenges between Kubernetes and external enterprise systems (like databases and identity providers) by developing the Saxo Service Blueprint. Utilizing Kubernetes operators and GitOps, they created a governed, versioned service catalog. Now, a single pull request triggers automated provisioning across Kubernetes, Kafka, databases and identity systems in minutes, eliminating manual steps, driving over 1,800 automated operations and enabling fast, repeatable recovery from Git.

Saxo Bank presented their case study on Wednesday, March 25.

CNCF encourages the community to participate in ongoing initiatives that strengthen the cloud native ecosystem. Technologists are invited to join the CNCF End User Community to collaborate with peers and contribute to the influential group of organizations harnessing cloud native architectures to solve real-world problems. The community is also encouraged to check the CNCF calendar for details on local events.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Kaitlin Thornhill
The Linux Foundation
[email protected]

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation