CNCF celebrates successful mentees from LFX Mentorship 2025 Term 3

Mentee Profile Highlights OpenCost WasmEdge Kmesh Kubernetes KubeStellar Cilium Kubernetes (Kube State Metrics) KubeEdge KubeArmor Podman Container Tools OpenCost CloudNativePG Full list of projects 2025 Term 3: September – November Posted on February 4, 2026 by Nate Waddington, Head of Mentorship & Documentation at CNCF The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is thrilled to congratulate the 2025 Term 3 (September – November) CNCF LFX Mentorship Program mentees who have successfully completed the program! This term saw a fantastic cohort of mentees working across 27 different Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects, including Cilium, KubeArmor, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, OpenCost, and many more. Our mentors and mentees have worked tirelessly over the past three months to improve code, documentation, and community engagement. The LFX Mentorship program continues to be a vital pipeline for new contributors to the cloud native ecosystem, fostering the next generation of open source leaders. Below, you’ll find highlights from some of our graduating mentees, followed by a full list of all the successful projects and participants from this term. The next term of CNCF LFX Mentorship is accepting applications now! If you’re interested in participating, check out our list of projects to apply to. Applications are open til February 10, 2026. During this LFX Mentorship with KubeEdge, I systematically restored the lifelong learning semantic segmentation benchmark in Ianvs—a distributed synergy AI benchmarking toolkit for edge computing. The project involved resolving 17 critical issues across multiple framework layers, including compatibility fixes for PyTorch 2.0+, CPU-only operation enablement, multi-round knowledge persistence, and path resolution for cross-environment deployment. Mentee: Abhishek Kumar (read Abhishek’s personal blog post about the mentorship experience) Mentors: Zimu Zheng, Shijing Hu “My LFX Mentorship with CNCF and KubeEdge has been an incredibly enriching experience that transformed the way I understand open-source engineering. Over the course of the program, I had the opportunity to work on a challenging real-world problem, collaborate closely with experienced mentors, and contribute meaningfully to a production-grade project. The guidance, reviews, and continuous support from the community helped me grow not just technically—through debugging, restoring complex pipelines, and understanding large-scale system architecture—but also professionally, by learning open-source best practices, communication, and collaborative development. This mentorship has been one of the most impactful learning journeys of my career, and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to contribute to CNCF’s vibrant and supportive ecosystem.