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CNCF award winner glad to contribute to Korea’s breakthrough in open-source cloud ecosystem
Son Seok-ho, fifth from left, poses with other award winners at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2025, held in Atlanta, Ga., Nov. 10, 2025. Courtesy of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
By Lee Kyung-min
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute senior researcher and special fellow Son Seok-ho said he is glad to contribute to Korea’s breakthrough in the global open-source cloud ecosystem, Friday.
He won the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Community Awards 2025, the highest honor in the cloud-native open-source world, becoming the first Korean to win the award.
The award was presented during KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2025, held in Atlanta, Ga., in November of last year.
“I hope my contribution would bolster Korea’s open-source capabilities and leadership, strengthening the country’s technological sovereignty amid intensifying global artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.”
The awards are chosen from around 270,000 global contributors.
Individuals who have made outstanding contributions across project development, documentation and community governance are selected.
Son was honored in the Lorem Ipsum category, a renamed version of the previous top documentarian award, reflecting his continuous and meaningful contributions to multiple CNCF projects.
The latest award comes only about two years after his winning of the Kubernetes Contributor Awards in 2022, another prestigious global recognition.
“I hope I can make a meaningful contribution to Korea’s increasing influence in shaping global open-source standards,” he said.
During the KubeCon event, Son engaged with over 10,000 global cloud and open-source experts, building strong networks as a CNCF global ambassador.
The awards helped raise Korea’s visibility and credibility, elevating the country’s standing in the international open-source community.
“Cloud-native computing has become the core infrastructure for large-scale services and AI works,” he said.
Its expansion relies not only on technical maturity but also on long-established global open-source communities.
This is why research and development can no longer ignore open source, and Korea must see it as a key platform for collaboration and innovation.
“I hope this award motivates more Korean experts to join the global open-source ecosystem.”