Faseela Kundattil is one of those people who just seems to do a lot of things: Cloud Native Developer, project maintainer, CNCF Ambassador, LFX mentor, Technical Oversight Committee member, new mom, and now KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 Keynote speaker and co-chair. She even (co-)wrote the book on Istio Service Mesh (for kids!).
Maybe cloud native is her super power? She certainly credits cloud native with giving her opportunities early in her career that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
“I was just a few years into the industry but open source gave me a chance to contribute code upstream,” she says. “And the thing about open source was there were a lot of other companies who were collaborating with us on the same project. So it was giving me some perspective about how we are able to work in a remote environment, but still collaborate with each other in a remote way. We were very efficient and all that learning came from open source ways of working.”
Even at a very early stage in her career, Faseela was able to travel and give talks. “It was good exposure for me,” she says. “I learned how to represent my company externally, but also to make sure everybody’s needs are met and ours are met too. Collaboration is something I really learned from open source.”
Her bottom line: “I do not think if you work in a single company, in a fully closed environment, you’ll get all this learning and collaboration and supporting each other kind of environment,” she explains. To get all that, it takes cloud native.
And it doesn’t hurt to have your family behind you either. “While cloud native may seem to be my superpower, I am really grateful to have a supportive family: my husband and my 10 year-old daughter who have extended all their support in the background taking care of our one year-old baby boy while I pay attention to my KubeCon responsibilities and look like a super woman!”
How it all started
Faseela, who is from India, started her career in Bangalore, spending nearly 11 years in the software networking industry. Her first role was at Ericsson as a Graduate Engineering Trainee after college and eventually she moved to Cisco as part of the platform engineering team. When Covid hit, she and her family decided to make the move to Europe and they settled in Aachen, Germany where she was able to return to Ericsson. The move made her happy, she says, because she was able to go back to working in open source. At Ericsson she’d worked on Linux Foundation projects including Open Daylight. “I really loved that. I missed those times because it was really that collaborative environment in open source,” she explained.
Her return to Ericsson gave her the chance to work on a CNCF project, Istio, and she’s been deep into open source for these last three years. “I started as a normal contributor first, but I was soon able to become a maintainer and then later a steering committee member,” she says. Faseela has also served as the event co-chair for both the IstioDays co-located with KubeCon in 2023 and has been a Program Committee member at several KubeCons. And of course her day job keeps her busy too: she is a key member driving the 5G transformation of Ericsson, designing Cloud Native Network Functions and bridging the gap between telco and open source.
Most recently, she’s been elected to the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (the TOC), which is the governing body that gives technical directions for all the CNCF projects. And she is a co-chair for the upcoming three KubeCon + CloudNativeCons, “something I’m really looking forward to.”
New to KubeCon? Faseela’s best advice
No matter where you are on your cloud native journey, you’ll find a place for you at KubeCon, of that Faseela is certain. “It’s like the best event or the best platform where you can network and get to know other experts from the industry and understand how cloud computing works and how to contribute to open source.” Her suggestions for those new to KubeCon: Pick the beginner tracks, dive into the ContribFests, don’t skip the KubeCrawl, consider the Peer Group Mentoring opportunities, attend the live demos, explore the Project Pavillion, and just network in the hallways.
Don’t miss Faseela’s talks
She and co-author Lin Sun will be speaking about their book Izzy Saves the Birthday.
Faseela and several others will be delivering a keynote on Cloud Native Evolution in Telecom: 5G, 6G and Beyond!
And she will also be at Contribfest: A Beginner’s Guide to Contributing to Istio.