Kris Nóva

Open Source Kubernetes Linux Kernel Platform Security Rust Go eBPF Cloud Native CNCF Ambassador Transgender Activist Alpinist Author

The Story

She Wrote Code, Scaled Mountains, and Named Things Honestly

Let's start where most people wouldn't: Kris Nóva spent part of her early twenties homeless in the Midwest. She found programming not because she had a scholarship or a mentor, but because it was one of the few places where the code was judged on its merits, not the person who wrote it. Three startup exits later, she was writing infrastructure tools that reshaped how the industry thought about deploying Kubernetes.

That early chapter - survival followed by mastery - informed everything she built afterward. The Privilege Escalation Foundation wasn't a PR exercise. It was Kris taking a Linux security concept and turning it into a nonprofit that gave cash and access to transgender people in STEM. The naming was deliberate, the mission was personal.

By the time she joined GitHub as Principal Engineer in early 2023, she had already worked at SolidFire, Microsoft's Deis division, Heptio, VMware, Sysdig, and Twilio. Each stop left a trail of open source projects, talks, and collaborators who described her the same way: relentlessly brilliant, incapable of pretense, genuinely kind.

We lost one of the leading lights of tech... Relentlessly driven, astonishingly brilliant, and one of the bravest people I ever met.

- Josh Berkus, on Kris Nóva's passing

Her talks had titles like "Kubernetes Clusterfuck" - which tells you something about how she operated. Not shock value. Just accuracy. The cloud-native community spent years pretending Kubernetes was simple, and Kris spent those same years telling conference rooms what was actually wrong. People kept inviting her back because she was right.

Character Sketch

Traits That Defined Her Work

ENGINEER

Memory-Safe by Design

She chose Rust for Aurae not as a trend, but as a philosophy. Memory safety in code mirrored her insistence on structural safety in community governance.

ADVOCATE

Naming Things Correctly

Her Privilege Escalation Foundation took a Linux security term and made it mean something real. She believed naming things accurately was the first act of fixing them.

ALPINIST

The Mountain Was the Answer

Kris climbed because summits required honesty. The mountain didn't care about your title or your funding round. It cared about preparation and presence.

. . . . .

The Work

What She Built When No One Was Watching

The career list reads like a tour of every critical transition in cloud-native infrastructure. At Heptio, she helped early Kubernetes adopters get their footing. At Sysdig, she led the open source team as Falco - the runtime security tool - grew adoption by 240% in nine months. At Twilio, she was Senior Principal Software Engineer while simultaneously writing a book, founding a nonprofit, and building a Mastodon instance.

Kubicorn was one of her first major open source contributions: a tool that brought sanity to Kubernetes infrastructure management before the tooling ecosystem had caught up to the platform's ambitions. It hit 1.7K GitHub stars. But by her own accounting, the number that mattered wasn't the star count - it was the engineers who stopped fighting their infrastructure and started building on it.

Aurae was her final major project - a distributed systems runtime daemon written in Rust, designed as a memory-safe replacement for existing process managers in cloud environments. It wasn't just a technical choice. She was asking what happens if you design runtime infrastructure from first principles, without the accumulated weight of convention. The project hit 1.9K stars before she died.

Boopkit was something else entirely: a Linux eBPF backdoor research tool. The GitHub description read "Linux eBPF backdoor over TCP. Spawn reverse shells, RCE, on prior privileged access." She published it because understanding attack surface means understanding what attackers already know. 1.7K stars. Security engineers loved it.

Key Projects

Aurae Runtime - Memory-safe distributed systems daemon in Rust (1.9K stars)
Kubicorn - Kubernetes infrastructure management (1.7K stars)
Boopkit - Linux eBPF backdoor research tool (1.7K stars)
NAML - Kubernetes YAML to Golang converter (1.3K stars)
Hachyderm.io - Mastodon instance for tech professionals; scaled to 40K users
Nivenly Foundation - Open source governance for Hachyderm and Aurae
Privilege Escalation Foundation - STEM support for gender minorities
Contributions to Linux kernel, Kubernetes core, Go programming language, and Falco
CNCF Ambassador; organized multiple Kubernetes special interest groups

. . . . .

The Hachyderm Chapter

700 Users. One Month. 40,000 People.

BEFORE

November 2022

Hachyderm was a small, curated Mastodon instance with about 700 users. Kris ran it as a community project - a place for technical professionals who wanted something different from algorithmic noise.

THE EVENT

Twitter Exodus

When Twitter's acquisition triggered a mass migration, Hachyderm became one of the most visible landing spots. 40,000 users arrived in weeks. Kris and her team had to scale infrastructure in real time, documenting everything publicly.

AFTER

The Nivenly Foundation

In early 2023, Kris co-founded The Nivenly Foundation as a formal governance layer for Hachyderm and Aurae. Open source sustainability wasn't a slogan for her - it was an operational problem she solved.

Career Timeline

A Decade of Making the Cloud Less Terrible

Early Career

Unhoused in the Midwest; found programming and completed three successful startup exits. Discovered that code was judged on merit, not identity.

2015

Worked at SolidFire on storage infrastructure. Built fluency in distributed systems at enterprise scale.

2016

Joined Microsoft's Deis division. Worked as developer advocate and engineer on Kubernetes - then still emerging as the container orchestration standard.

2017

Co-authored Cloud Native Infrastructure with Justin Garrison, published by O'Reilly Media. One of the first definitive texts on cloud-native architecture. Joined Heptio.

2018-2019

Continued at Heptio/VMware (post-acquisition). Created kubicorn. Named CNCF Ambassador. Began building a reputation for technical honesty at conferences.

2019-2021

Chief Open Source Advocate at Sysdig. Led Falco open source project to 240% adoption growth in nine months.

2021-2022

Senior Principal Software Engineer at Twilio. Founded Privilege Escalation Foundation. Wrote Hacking Capitalism. Launched Aurae runtime project. Grew Hachyderm to 40,000 users.

2023

Co-founded The Nivenly Foundation (January). Joined GitHub as Principal Engineer for infrastructure platform (February). Passed away in a climbing accident, Seattle, Washington (August 16).

. . . . .

The Books

She Wrote What Other People Were Afraid to Say

O'REILLY MEDIA · 2017

Cloud Native Infrastructure

co-authored with Justin Garrison

The book that helped a generation of engineers understand what "cloud native" actually meant in practice. Published before the Kubernetes ecosystem had matured, it answered questions that hadn't quite been asked yet. Required reading at companies that were serious about infrastructure. Kris co-authored it while simultaneously working full-time - which tells you something about her operating tempo.

INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED · 2022

Hacking Capitalism

Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money

Written in the California desert during the 2020 pandemic. Kris described it as "a fucking textbook" for people who didn't grow up with family wealth or elite network access. It modeled the tech industry as a system - with capitalists, workers, exploitation, and leverage clearly labeled. Not a polemic. A map. She wanted marginalized technologists to understand the game before they were already in it.

The Human Behind the PRs

Some Engineers Code. She Built Communities.

The GitHub profile bio says "You should never run my code." It's a joke, and it isn't. Kris wrote boopkit - a working eBPF backdoor - and published it publicly so security engineers could understand the attack surface. She streamed her open source work live on Twitch. She hosted Kubernetes talks with titles that made conference organizers nervous and attendees take notes.

When Twitter started collapsing in November 2022, tens of thousands of tech workers needed somewhere to go. Hachyderm - Kris's curated Mastodon instance for technical professionals - absorbed 40,000 of them in weeks. She and her team scaled infrastructure under pressure, documented the chaos publicly, and turned a crisis into an argument for decentralized social infrastructure.

Her Mastodon handle was @nova@hachyderm.io. A nova is a star that suddenly brightens by nuclear explosion - briefly, brilliantly, completely. She wouldn't have picked that metaphor. But it holds.

She was an amazing person that lived out loud and built connection and community wherever she went.

- Joe Beda, co-creator of Kubernetes

The Privilege Escalation Foundation - which she founded - gave $5,000 in sponsorships in 2021 to transgender and non-binary people in STEM. The mission started with healthcare and education, because those are the barriers that stop people before they ever touch a keyboard.

She was also just funny. She showed up to Kubernetes panels armed with stories that made the room simultaneously uncomfortable and unable to stop laughing. Her "Kubernetes clusterfuck" talks named real problems that polished conference talks refused to name. The tech community rewarded honesty even when it couldn't produce it itself.

In Her Own Words

Quotes Worth Keeping

Programmers were one kind of people who didn't care who they were working with as long as the code worked.

- Kris Nóva, on finding tech as refuge

For every exciting innovation, a legacy system must rot.

- Hacking Capitalism

The tech industry expects competition because the tech industry is built on capitalism.

- Hacking Capitalism

I was able to pause, and reflect.

- On writing Hacking Capitalism during 2020

Fast Facts

Things Worth Knowing

FUN FACT

Named After an Explosion

Her Mastodon handle was @nova@hachyderm.io. A nova is a star that suddenly, briefly, brilliantly explodes with light. She wouldn't have chosen that metaphor - but it fits.

IRONY

"Never Run My Code"

Her GitHub bio warned everyone not to run her code. Her code had 388 repositories, thousands of stars, and ran on infrastructure across the cloud-native industry.

LEGACY

Nonprofit Named After a Hack

Privilege escalation is a cyberattack technique - gaining more system access than you're supposed to have. She named her nonprofit for gender minorities in STEM after the concept. Intentional. Perfect.

CONTEXT

Wrote a Book in the Desert

Hacking Capitalism was conceived and written during 2020 pandemic isolation in the California desert. The forced pause from workaholic tech life became the engine for her most personal work.

REACH

Streamed the Work Live

She streamed open source development on Twitch at krisnova. Not tutorials. Actual work - debugging, designing, thinking out loud. Her audience watched her build the tools they would use.

SCALE

40,000 Users in 30 Days

Hachyderm grew from 700 to 40,000 users in a single month during the Twitter exodus. She and her team scaled the infrastructure under pressure and documented every decision publicly.

. . . . .

Legacy

What She Left Behind

Kris Nóva died on August 16, 2023, from injuries sustained in a climbing accident in Seattle, Washington. She was 36. The Nivenly Foundation - which she had co-founded earlier that year - published a memorial and announced stewardship plans for both Hachyderm and the Aurae project.

What she left behind isn't a mystery. It's code and governance and books and a foundation. It's the engineers who worked with her and carry different assumptions about what open source infrastructure can be. It's the 40,000 people on Hachyderm who found a place to land when another platform became hostile. It's the trans and non-binary engineers in STEM who received support from the Privilege Escalation Foundation and kept going.

She believed that the way to make tech more equitable wasn't to petition the existing power structure. It was to build parallel infrastructure that worked better - and make it genuinely open. The Nivenly Foundation, Hachyderm, Aurae, the Privilege Escalation Foundation: these were all versions of the same thesis.

Sharing knowledge and lifting everyone up creates meaningful change.

- Remembered by those who worked with Kris Nóva

She was prolific, principled, and funny. She named things what they were. She climbed mountains between conference talks. She lived, as the people who knew her keep saying, very out loud.

What She Built That Continues

The Nivenly Foundation - governing open source projects beyond any single contributor
Hachyderm - a curated Mastodon instance for tech professionals with 40K+ users
Aurae runtime project - continuing under Nivenly Foundation stewardship
Privilege Escalation Foundation - supporting gender minorities in STEM
Cloud Native Infrastructure (O'Reilly, 2017) - still in print and assigned reading
Hacking Capitalism (2022) - still circulating as a guide for marginalized technologists
388 public repositories on GitHub documenting a decade of infrastructure thinking
Contributions to Linux, Kubernetes, Go, Rust, and Falco still running in production

Kris Nóva

She Wrote Code, Scaled Mountains, and Named Things Honestly

Traits That Defined Her Work

What She Built When No One Was Watching

700 Users. One Month. 40,000 People.

A Decade of Making the Cloud Less Terrible

She Wrote What Other People Were Afraid to Say

Some Engineers Code. She Built Communities.

Quotes Worth Keeping

Things Worth Knowing

What She Left Behind

Where to Go From Here