TL;DR
The eBPF Foundation announced the recipients of its 2026 Community & Advocacy Fellowship, recognizing contributors expanding global access to eBPF through automated runtime security, hands-on operational debugging resources, and community leadership. The 2026 fellows are Dr. Constanze Roedig (Software Bill of Behavior runtime baselines for Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects) and Rishi Mondal (eBPF production operations and Cilium debugging content).
Fellows will expand global access to eBPF through education, operational tooling, and community-building initiatives. The eBPF Foundation, which advances eBPF’s upstream development and promotes its secure adoption across platforms, today announced the recipients of its 2026 Community & Advocacy Fellowship.
The fellowship provides six months of financial and institutional support to contributors who are not employed full-time on eBPF, enabling them to create resources that educate, operationalize, and engage the global eBPF ecosystem. Fellows receive a monthly stipend and commit to producing technical guides, documentation, interactive labs, open source tools, and community advocacy deliverables.
2026 Fellowship Recipients
1. Dr. Constanze Roedig — Software Bill of Behavior (SBoB) Runtime Security Baselines
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador, SecurityNative group lead, Independent. Through the fellowship, Dr. Roedig will build generalized, portable runtime-behavior baselines, termed Software Bill of Behavior (SBoB), for CNCF projects and contribute them as default project configurations. Utilizing eBPF profilers such as Inspector Gadget and Kubescape, these baselines enable out-of-the-box anomaly detection for Kubernetes clusters. Her four-step methodology spans cluster testing, security-contrast mock attack tests, GitHub Actions automation, and integration into tutorials, skill.md files, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. This initiative aims to scale human-readable, composable runtime profiles across CNCF projects, make runtime detection and response as ubiquitous as observability, and lower compliance barriers for European Union regulations including the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), Network and Information Security Directive 2 (NIS2), and Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
2. Rishi Mondal — Production eBPF Operations and Debugging Resources
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Obmondo, CNCF KubeStellar maintainer, Linux Foundation Mentorship (LFX) mentor, and Docker Captain. Rishi’s project addresses the gap between beginner “hello world” programming tutorials and high-level architecture overviews by creating practical operational debugging content for eBPF running in production. Drawing from real-world experience operating Cilium and Hubble across multi-cloud and bare-metal infrastructure, his fellowship will produce a runnable tutorial repository, videos, blog posts, eBPF tool integration demos, and documentation contributions to official eBPF docs. He will also translate learning materials into Bengali and Hindi and deliver community talks across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Quotes
“As eBPF adoption accelerates, the community is beginning to focus on advanced runtime security and day-two operations,” said Bill Mulligan, eBPF Foundation Governing Board Chair. “This year’s fellows are tackling these critical challenges head-on. Constanze’s innovative work on standardized runtime security baselines and Rishi’s focus on production-grade debugging will empower engineering teams to securely and confidently operate eBPF at scale.”
“My mission is to make runtime security more accessible and give it better user experience, thus we created the SBOB (software bill of behavior). This was possible because eBPF allows interpreting the same kernel events for myriad questions in user-space,” said Dr. Constanze Roedig, 2026 Fellowship Recipient. “This fellowship will enable me to take these human-readable, composable runtime SBOB profiles from one CNCF project to many. I firmly believe that detection/response should be as ubiquitous as observability—and eBPF makes that possible.”
“One of my most useful eBPF lessons came from a Grafana dashboard full of blank panels at 2 AM. Hubble had all the data, but we just couldn’t see what it was telling us,” said Rishi Mondal, 2026 Fellowship Recipient. “That’s the part I will work on. Debugging eBPF once it’s running in a real cluster. Over the fellowship I’ll turn real cases like this into tutorials, blog posts and videos, build demos of eBPF with different tools and projects, and contribute the best of it to the community. I’ll also translate learning material into Bengali and Hindi and give talks in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.”
Program Purpose
The Community & Advocacy Fellowship is designed to:
Empower individuals creating educational, operational, and outreach resources that broaden access to eBPF.
Strengthen the global community by lowering barriers to entry and expanding participation beyond traditional technical circles.
Support non-full-time contributors with financial stipends and institutional backing to produce impactful open source deliverables.
Fellows will share progress updates via technical blog posts, code repositories, and open source community channels throughout the six-month program.
More information: https://ebpf.foundation/ebpf-foundation-announces-community-advocacy-fellowship-program/
Member Highlights
Fellowship supports non–full-time contributors globally.
Focus areas include runtime security automation, production operations, documentation, interactive labs, multi-language translations, and advocacy.
Fellows will deliver portable runtime baselines for CNCF projects, open source production debugging guides, multilingual resources, and global community workshops.
FAQ
Q1: What is the eBPF Foundation Community & Advocacy Fellowship?
A six-month fellowship offering financial and institutional support to non-full-time contributors expanding global access to eBPF through education, tooling, and outreach.
Q2: Who are the 2026 recipients?
Dr. Constanze Roedig (Software Bill of Behavior runtime security profiles for CNCF projects) and Rishi Mondal (eBPF production operations, debugging guides, and multilingual outreach).
Q3: What projects will the fellows develop?
Dr. Roedig will create standardized Software Bill of Behavior (SBoB) runtime security baselines across CNCF projects with automation, tutorials, and Model Context Protocol integrations. Rishi Mondal will develop open source operational debugging tutorials, videos, eBPF tool integration demos, eBPF documentation additions, Bengali and Hindi translations, and community talks across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Q4: How does this fellowship support open source growth?
By funding independent contributors who build open source tooling, operational guidance, and educational materials, the fellowship accelerates community adoption, improves kernel tool reliability, and lowers entry barriers.
Q5: Where can I learn more or get involved?
Visit https://ebpf.foundation