No competition, more collaboration

Why this conversation

A service mesh such as Istio sits in the path of every request in a cluster, so the health of the project behind it matters to anyone who runs one. Faseela K sees that from two sides: she is a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and a maintainer of CNCF projects, Istio among them. On the Thursday of Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, the host sat down with her for a short conversation about the project, the community around the CNCF, and what keeps her in it.

This is a conversation of under five minutes. The story of the week it was filmed is in Open Source Summit Europe 2026: who we met.

Maintaining Istio

The host uses Istio a lot, and asks what it takes to maintain a project that size. It is not a single person, she answers, and that is the beauty of open source. Maintainers come from different companies and different parts of the world. The work is split into working groups, each led by a couple of maintainers. As long as everyone works together, it is not a big burden.

Ambassadors and community

Just before the recording, the CNCF ambassadors had gathered at the CNCF booth for a group photo. Many of them were in Prague, and she enjoys catching up with them at conferences around the world. The ambassador programme, the Cloud Native community groups and the meetups are, in her words, how everyone grows together.

The CKNE exam and KubeCon

Next on her calendar was KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, where she is giving a talk about the new Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer exam, the CKNE. She was one of the subject-matter experts who curated its content. She is also on a panel there.

After that comes KubeCon Europe 2027 in Barcelona. Its call for proposals was closing on 11 October, and she encourages anyone with a talk, a user story or a case study to submit. The conversation recalls that Amsterdam, with about 12,000 attendees, was the biggest KubeCon so far, and Barcelona may be bigger still: a lot of people, projects and maintainers in one place. The show’s own write-up of Amsterdam is in KubeCon Europe 2026.

No competition, more collaboration

Asked what she likes most about being part of the CNCF, she returns to where she started. “There is no competition but more collaboration,” she says. People from across the globe, with different backgrounds and competencies, work together to make what they build better day by day. Many of these things nobody can do alone. It is not only the diversity of cultures, she adds, but the diversity of technical expertise: it is better when all of it comes together.