Community Finalists

SKUDONET Community Edition is an open-source load balancer and web application firewall that helps DevOps teams manage application traffic, improve availability and strengthen security without relying on proprietary solutions.

Gonzo is a free, MIT-licensed terminal UI that gives engineers a live investigation layer for logs, with patterns, heatmaps, and bring-your-own-model AI, and no account, agent, or config.

He built and open-sourced api-onboarding-kit, a one-YAML-spec-to-four-gateway API onboarding automation that cut real onboarding from two days to three hours.

Liquibase Community makes database change automation accessible to developers, bringing version control, repeatable deployments, and database change management into modern software development workflows.

The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.

Agentic AppSec Best practices in the AI-DLC

Hackathon Community Champion, led strategic community engagements

Jenkins release officer, core maintainer, and key contributor

Darin hosts the DevOps Paradox podcast and the What's New in Jenkins webinars

Mihir Vora is a Senior Distinguished Engineer and two-term CDF Ambassador advancing DevOps through industry talks, published technical insights, open standards discussions, peer collaboration, and mentorship focused on safer, more effective software delivery.

Mohammad-Ali A'râbi is a Docker Captain, author, international speaker, and community organizer advocating for accessible DevOps and software supply-chain security worldwide.

Author of the Book "DevOps Mindset in Software Development: From Apprentice to Journeyman"

Southwest Airlines Technical leader in cloud and devops who organizes DevOpsDays Dallas and the Global Security Tour, serves on the cdCon Program Committee, and has mentored and trained more than 150 students in DevOps and cloud.

Crossplane maintainer (provider-civo) and founding engineer building production AI agents, with ~295 merged PRs across 45+ open-source repositories.

Georgii Kashintsev is the creator and long-term maintainer of Alligator, an independent open-source Prometheus monitoring agent in production on more than 3,000 servers since 2019.

Harish Shenoy — Maintainer of lakebase-cicd, an open-source Jenkins CI/CD project that brings Git-style database branching to Databricks Lakebase, giving every pull request its own isolated Postgres database via copy-on-write branching.

Karmendra Pandey contributes production-grade open-source work to the Strands Agents SDK and authored an MIT-licensed reference architecture (agentic-ai-aws-reference) for cost-governed AI agents on AWS.

Prof. Dr. Tianxiang Lu is a DevOps and cloud computing educator advancing industry-relevant engineering education through cloud-native technologies, automation, cybersecurity, and trustworthy AI.

Dr. Hafner is a Professor of Software Engineering at Munich University of Applied Sciences, where he involves students in open-source development through projects and theses

Mohammad-Ali A'râbi is a Docker Captain, author, and international speaker making container and software supply-chain security accessible through books, workshops, and independent technical education.

Benoît Ebner bridges generations of mainframe DevOps talent, sharing practical experience with the broader community while teaching, supporting internships, and helping students engage with the platform.

Brian Teller hosts Ship It Weekly and Kube Signals and publishes the free On Call Brief newsletter, giving on-call engineers practical, vendor-neutral context on the week's DevOps and SRE news.

Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, is a Governing Board Member for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a Governing Board Member for the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Cyber and Technology Resilience Experts (CTREX) Panel, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project.

QA/SDET Lead and Independent Creator and Maintainer of the DesktopAutomationHelper Open-Source Project, Reddysagar Akkaru Chenchu, is a software quality engineering leader who created an open-source, session-isolated desktop automation driver to improve concurrent testing and continuous delivery in shared Citrix environments.

An award-winning BFSI technology leader driving enterprise DevOps transformation, secure cloud-native banking platforms, engineering excellence, and industry thought leadership.

Ayelet turned operations for Google's air-gapped cloud from constant firefighting into a reliability practice that can grow: she brought in AI agents that cut alert noise by more than 97%, built a 24/7 production support tier that serves dozens of engineering teams, and helped shape how the wider industry runs reliable systems as co-author of the culture chapter in Google's new SRE book.

Debashis Bhattacharyya is a visionary DevSecOps leader driving enterprise transformation through innovation, security, and automation. He is an Author and Technical Reviewer of many white papers, books and blogs. He implemented DORA-based maturity models, performance gates, and secure pipelines. His initiatives reduced toolchain costs by 32%, improved lead time by 22%, and boosted productivity by 12%. A thought leader and mentor, he continues to shape the future of AI-infused DevSecOps globally.

Deepak Kaul is an experienced Senior Software Engineer at Marriott International driving enterprise-scale digital modernization through innovative software architecture, federated data systems, and AI-powered solutions that enable scalable, resilient technology platforms.

Venkata Kondepati is a transformational enterprise DevOps leader who has driven global cloud modernization, engineering automation, SRE excellence, and measurable improvements in reliability, cost, productivity, and technology delivery at scale.

Lawrence leads ARCON’s DevOps function, keeping 10+ products running for 800+ enterprise customers while making DevOps self-service for developers.

Manoj ia a Senior Cloud Engineer who cut enterprise API onboarding from two days to three hours with a self-service gateway portal, then open-sourced the approach as api-onboarding-kit.

Mihir Vora is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One advancing enterprise DevOps and developer experience through standardized CI/CD, automated governance, scalable platform engineering, and practices that simplify secure software delivery.

Staff Software Engineer and tech lead at Meta who built and leads the tooling and evaluation infrastructure that makes AI agents reliable, discoverable, and safe to operate in production.

Ankush lead enterprise DevOps transformation with a focus on intelligent automation, platform reliability, and proactive risk management, turning operational improvements into measurable business value.

Gary Fusco, Senior Vice President at M&T Bank and Executive Sponsor for the z Development Program for the Communityand a visionary mainframe leader. He is passionate advocate for talent development who has championed enterprise-scale DevOps modernization while creating transformative opportunities and pathways for emerging talent;strengthening the future of the mainframe community.

Sundeep Bobba leads DevOps transformation for Southwest Airlines’ Digital Platforms, modernizing CI/CD, embedding security into software delivery, and scaling engineering infrastructure supporting billions of dollars in airline e-commerce.

Keyes/NRB Group transformed mainframe DevOps, reducing lead time for changes by 76% while improving speed, stability, and responsiveness across complex client environments.

A DevOps team that keeps 10+ ARCON products running across 35+ hosting environments for 800+ enterprise customers, while giving developers self-service tools that cut their wait times.

Bringing AI agents into everyday business operations, from customer support to onboarding, built on open standards and running in production today.

A cost-aware routing layer for LLM agents that routes each request across model tiers using a token-economics cost model — cutting inference spend while holding quality, with a verified runnable open-source example.

Rajeshkumar Rajaseakaran Nair developed an enterprise-focused AI validation approach that integrates continuous quality, reliability, and governance checks into AI-enabled software delivery workflows.

Scopic uses a human-governed AI-assisted development workflow to accelerate software delivery while preserving code quality, security, and engineering accountability.

Behavioral Privacy Leakage in Agentic Negotiation: Formalizing and Mitigating Inference Attacks via Randomized Policies is a peer-reviewed research paper introducing behavioral differential privacy to reduce inference attacks against autonomous negotiation agents while preserving convergence and utility.

A travelogue through more than 30 years of software delivery. Bernhard Scheffold treats DevOps as a way of thinking. Tools come second. The book follows a developer from apprentice to journeyman, from “operations is not my problem” to being ready for what nobody planned. Written for developers, architects and project leads.

A DevOps-inspired blueprint for engineering respect and trust as observable, measurable, and operational capabilities that improve flow, resilience, governance, and human–AI collaboration.

Data Site Reliability Engineer and independent author of practitioner articles on Apache Flink stream processing, distributed storage, and applied cryptography for data pipelines.

Black Forest Shadow is a fantasy adventure set in 19th-century Germany that blends storytelling, software engineering concepts, and DevOps education into an unconventional learning experience.

Published on DevOps.com, Mihir Vora's "Designing for Failure" offers DevOps practitioners four actionable resilience practices covering degraded operations, failure isolation, progressive delivery, and continuous learning to help teams build more reliable software systems.

The book introduces an innovative framework for transforming how businesses and their technology service providers collaborate in an increasingly complex digital world, ultimately creating more value for both parties and the broader community.

An AI-native, vendor-neutral DEVOPS INSTITUTE® standard that connects people, practices, governance, and technology through a practical operating model for delivering software-enabled products and services. Reviewed and shaped by the DevOps and ITIL communities and freely available digitally, it provides a shared foundation for safer, more reliable value delivery.

A comprehensive, practical engineering playbook designed to guide modern software engineering organizations through transitioning traditional infrastructure operations into AI-driven, automated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) frameworks

A practitioner-written book that applies control theory to CI/CD, showing teams how to turn open-loop pipelines into self-correcting delivery systems, adopted as course material at Messiah University and ranked #1 New Release in Amazon's Cloud Computing category.

A practical DevOps automation guide featuring 100+ proven recipes that help engineers master continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, cloud technologies, and modern DevOps practices.

"I Gave Every Pull Request Its Own Database" by Harish Shenoy is a practitioner-grade guide to database CI/CD with copy-on-write branching for Postgres, featuring working Jenkins pipeline code and a production-tested testing model.

All Day AI is a free, live, online, community conference held on October 22, 2026 for teams and practitioners building, securing, and shipping AI applications.

GrafanaCON is Grafana Labs’ flagship community conference for Grafana and its open source ecosystem.

Virtual Community Hackathon, impacted 10,000 community leaders across the global. 100+ registrations

DevOpsDays Graz is an independent, community-driven tech conference in Graz, Austria, bringing together DevOps enthusiasts, local talent, and international experts to share knowledge, exchange fresh perspectives, celebrate diversity, and strengthen the regional developer community.

A volunteer-run community conference serving North Texas since 2016, whose 2026 edition brought together more than 300 attendees and 20 speakers for talks and practitioner-led open space discussions.

Ship It Weekly is an independent weekly podcast that turns the week's DevOps, SRE, cloud and security news into what on-call engineers should actually do about it, alongside long-form conversations with practitioners.

The API Platforms For Scale Newsletter curates intelligence on the trends, technologies, and practices shaping API platforms.

Open-access practitioner resources — a peer-citable preprint with DOI and a public reference architecture — teaching production teams how to take AI agent pilots to production on AWS with cost governance, per-agent IAM identity, and eval-gated deployments.

How Today’s Students Are Choosing a Career in Mainframe Development podcast brings student and industry voices together to explore the mainframe skills challenge and inspire the next generation of practitioners.

a weekly podcast co-hosted by Darin Pope and Viktor Farcic about all things DevOps

ContainerSecurity.dev is an independent DevSecOps learning platform combining practical security guides, original supply-chain research, hands-on labs, and story-driven education.