Yesterday, June 25, at cdCon 2025 in Denver, Colorado, we announced the 2025 Continuous Delivery Foundation Community Award winners.
Thank you to everyone who nominated and voted and to our projects, who ran their awards. And finally, thank you to our award officers for ensuring the sanctity of the CDF awards:
- Giorgi Keratishvili
- Kris Stern
This year, 12 awards were given out. Congratulations to this year’s winners! Your hard work and leadership make this community and the progress of Continuous Delivery possible.
And the 2025 CDF Community Award winners are…
CDF Awards
Top Ambassador: Lisa N. Cao
Over the past year, Lisa has given several talks that have spread the word about the CD Foundation. She’s been involved in both cdCon (2024 and 2025—being on the Program Committee for this year’s event). She also launched the CDF’s DataOps Initiative at the end of 2024, which puts together technical material and guides for users interested in the end-to-end process of deploying Machine Learning (ML) applications and models within their organizations. Lisa also gave CD Workshop about the Fundamentals of DataOps and was on one of our Techstrong Panel about Modern DataOps. Lisa is great at building other people up and bringing the best out of them—which gets them excited to be a part of our CDF community.
Continuous Enthusiast: Tracy Ragan
Tracy is a passionate advocate, thought leader, and innovator in the Continuous Delivery (CD) ecosystem, consistently championing awareness, education, and the adoption of CD Foundation initiatives and open-source projects.
From spearheading the CI/CD Cybersecurity SIG to advocating for the critical role of DevOps in strengthening the software supply chain, Tracy has been a driving force behind the CD Foundation. She has played a pivotal role in building the Ortelius Open-Source Community, fostering its growth and impact, while also working to bridge collaboration between the CDF and OpenSSF. As a CDF TOC member and an active participant in organizing cdCon, Tracy has continuously contributed to shaping the future of the CD landscape.
Beyond her technical expertise, Tracy is a dedicated mentor and a strong advocate for diversity in tech, inspiring the next generation of DevOps professionals. Her unwavering commitment to collaboration, innovation, and community-building makes her a standout candidate for Top CDF Enthusiast.
Top Doc(umenter): Tracy Ragan
Over the years, Tracy had her hands in so many open source pots, making the CD Foundation a better place to learn and collaborate. This year, she launched the CI/CD Cybersecurity SIG, which is developing a guide to help DevOps engineers build security-compliant CI/CD pipelines by mapping new open source security automation tools to evolving security frameworks. This is a group initiative, but her initial work on the SIGs new website alone makes her a great candidate for this award.
Top Contributor: Garima Bajpai
Garima led the ambassador program for the past 3 years, including this new upcoming one in 2025. She’s conducted workshops, led panels and given many talks. She has served on the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for the Ortelius project and is currently serving on the CD Foundation’s TOC. To finish it off, Garima has co-authored a book with other ambassadors called CI/CD Design Patterns.
Top End User: Apple
This year Apple has been consistently contributing to the success of the Continuous Delivery Foundation by sponsoring the Foundation as a member, serving on the Governing Board and Technical Oversight Committee, and relentlessly spreading the word about the importance of interoperability in the Continuous Delivery space, through talks at cdCon, at the UN Open Source event, contributions to “The Pipeline” video series in collaboration with Techstrong as well as blog series that resulted from a collaboration with the DORA community. Apple has been consistently contributing to the CDEvents project as well.
CDF Project Most Valuable Contributor Awards
CDEvents: Ben Powell
Since the early days of the project, Ben has made significant contributions to CDEvents. Notably, he led the design and implementation of features such as links and chains. In the past year, Ben has been even more vital to the project and community, facilitating working groups, experimenting with different technologies to make the project easier to maintain and to adopt, working with the CloudEvents community to make our events verifiable and playing a key role in the launch of a new project, Conduit, under the CDEvents umbrella. Thank you, Ben, for all your invaluable contributions!
Ortelius: Tony Carrato
Tony has been an outstanding mentor to the Ortelius open source project, offering both technical leadership and strategic guidance across multiple facets of the community. His deep expertise and thoughtful direction have shaped critical conversations in Architecture Working Group meetings, Governing Board decisions, and Outreach Committee initiatives. Tony consistently brings clarity and structure to discussions, helping the project navigate complex challenges while fostering broader community engagement. His leadership has been instrumental in advancing Ortelius’ mission of improving software supply chain visibility through open collaboration.
Screwdriver: Ming Hay Luk
Ming spearheaded the launch of the New Screwdriver Pipeline page which has been transformative for our users – introducing new navigation, intuitive designs, improving usability, and enhancing the overall user experience. Beyond his technical contributions, he also has been instrumental in reviewing community-submitted pull requests with great attention to detail, helping maintain high code quality while fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment. His dedication exemplifies the spirit of open source.
Spinnaker: Kiran Godishala
This year’s Spinnaker MVP, Kiran Godishala, has led a major and long-overdue upgrade to Retrofit2 across the codebase. While it may not sound flashy, it’s been a significant and high-effort change that required deep knowledge of Spinnaker internals. He’s been consistently responsive to feedback and bug reports throughout the process, making it far easier for others to adopt the upgrade. Looking ahead, he’s already planning the next major modernization effort—upgrading to version 2 of the AWS SDK.
Graduated Project Awards
Jenkins
Most Valuable Advocate: Stefan Spieker
For his continuous efforts in advocating Jenkins in our company, but also beyond. Many users have prejudices towards Jenkins which Stefan meets with excellent explanations and showcases. There are very few people that don’t start using Jenkins after having a chat with him about it.
Furthermore, Stefan has organized the Hacktoberfest event in 2024, encouraging other colleagues to contribute to open source and specifically Jenkins. There were some first time contributions from people that are not software developers.
This year, he will speak at two different conferences, where he will also advocate for Jenkins. He also wrote a fairly successful book where he writes in one chapter about Open Source and uses Jenkins in there as an example (“52 Stunden Informatik: Was jeder über Informatik wissen sollte”).
Security MVP: Daniel Beck
For his skilled and thorough efforts to maintain and improve the security of Jenkins. His code reviews for Jenkins core are great examples of attention to detail and awareness of impact. He reviews security threats carefully and keeps himself current on recent security topics. He works well with release leads when delivering Jenkins security releases and works well with the Jenkins infrastructure team in many different areas.
Most Valuable Contributor: Jan Faracik
For his tremendous contributions to the UI/UX front of the Jenkins project as the UI/UX SIG Lead, not just this year but throughout the years, and for helping to foster a collaborative environment, especially in helping newcomers of the Jenkins ecosystem via code reviews.
