I'm now a CNCF Ambassador

In April 2025 I started the Vietnamese track of the CNCF Cloud Native Glossary. There wasn’t one, and English was the first thing standing between a lot of Vietnamese engineers and a CNCF project. So I opened the tracking discussion, set up the dev-vi workflow from scratch, and started asking people to join me.

Seven contributors showed up, from different companies. We worked through 40+ terms. Ten weeks later the Vietnamese edition was live and announced on the CNCF blog.

The term count isn’t the part I’m proud of. It’s that curious engineers walked out of it with a real upstream CNCF track record. Several of them went on to become Kubernetes community members.

And it didn’t stop there. The same work continues in Kubernetes SIG Docs Vietnamese, translating Kubernetes’ own documentation. I’m an owner and approver there, which mostly means reading a lot of Vietnamese pull requests and trying to make the first-time contributor experience less intimidating than mine was.

Alongside that: contributions across CNCF projects, membership in the Kubernetes and HAMi orgs, submitting Viettel AI Platform to the new Kubernetes AI Conformance program, and talks at KCD & OpenInfra Days Vietnam, Cloud Native Hanoi and the CNCF 10th Birthday Bash, mostly about the thing I actually run: fractional GPU and AI workloads on Kubernetes.

Today I got the email.

I’m now a CNCF Ambassador.

The reason this one matters to me is written plainly on the CNCF Ambassadors page:

Ambassadors are an extension of CNCF, furthering the mission of ‘making cloud native ubiquitous’ through community leadership and mentorship.

That’s the direction I want my career to keep pointing in. Not just contributing myself, but shortening the path from “user” to “contributor” for engineers who currently believe that path isn’t open to them.

A word about where I do this from. I’m lucky to work at Viettel Networks (Viettel Group), a company that didn’t just talk about open source but put its name on it: a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the OpenInfra Foundation and The Linux Foundation. I handle those relationships day to day, which means my community work and my day job point the same direction instead of competing. Not every engineer gets that. I don’t take it for granted.

And thank you to Khanh Tran, Vietnam’s first CNCF Ambassador, and my fellow owner in sig-docs-vi. The goal was never to duplicate what he built. It’s to double the bandwidth.

And to VIETOPENINFRA, the community that built the stages every one of those talks happened on.

Plenty of work ahead. Thanks to everyone who kept this ecosystem open long enough for someone like me to find a way in.

But today I’m taking a moment.

Thank you, CNCF. ❤️