From Cloud Native to AI Native: Where Are We Going?
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025 in Atlanta, the panel of experts - Kate Goldenring of Fermyon Technologies, Idit Levine of Solo.io, Shaun O'Meara of Mirantis, Sean O'Dell of Dynatrace and James Harmison of Red Hat - explored whether the cloud native era has evolved into an AI native era — and what that shift means for infrastructure, security and development practices. Jonathan Bryce of the CNCF argued that true AI-native systems depend on robust inference layers, which have been overshadowed by the hype around chatbots and agents. As organizations push AI to the edge and demand faster, more personalized experiences, Fermyon’s Kate Goldenring highlighted WebAssembly as a way to bundle and securely deploy models directly to GPU-equipped hardware, reducing latency while adding sandboxed security.
Dynatrace’s Sean O’Dell noted that AI dramatically increases observability needs: integrating LLM-based intelligence adds value but also expands the challenge of filtering massive data streams to understand user behavior. Meanwhile, Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara emphasized a return to deeper infrastructure awareness. Unlike abstracted cloud native workloads, AI workloads running on GPUs require careful attention to hardware performance, orchestration, and energy constraints. Managing power-hungry data centers efficiently, he argued, will be a defining challenge of the AI native era.
Learn more from The New Stack about evolving cloud native ecosystem to an AI native era
Cloud Native and AI: Why Open Source Needs Standards Like MCP
A Decade of Cloud Native: From CNCF, to the Pandemic, to AI
Crossing the AI Chasm: Lessons From the Early Days of Cloud
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How Idit Levine’s Athletic Past Fueled Solo.io‘s Startup
Idit Levine’s tech journey originated in an unexpected place: a basketball court. As a seventh grader in Israel, playing in hoops tournaments definitely sparked her competitive side.
“I was basically going to compete with all my international friends for two minutes without parents, without anything,” Levine said. “I think it made me who I am today. It’s really giving you a lot of confidence to teach you how to handle situations … stay calm and still focus.”
Developing that calm and focus proved an asset during Levine’s subsequent career in professional basketball in Israel, and when she later started her own company. In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast series, Levine, founder and CEO of Solo.io, an application networking company with a $1 billion valuation, shared her startup story.
The conversation was co-hosted by Colleen Coll and Heather Joslyn of The New Stack
After finishing school and service in the Israeli Army, Levine was still unsure of what she wanted to do. She noticed her brother and sister’s fascination with computers. Soon enough, she recalled, “I picked up a book to teach myself how to program.”
It was only a matter of time before she found her true love: the cloud native ecosystem. “It's so dynamic, there's always something new coming. So it's not boring, right? You can assess it, and it's very innovative.”
Moving from one startup company to the next, then on to bigger companies including Dell EMC where she was chief technology officer of the cloud management division, Levine was happy seeking experiences that challenged her technically. “And at one point, I said to myself, maybe I should stop looking and create one.”
Learning How to Pitch
Winning support for Solo.io demanded that the former hoops player acquire an unfamiliar skill: how to pitch. Levine’s company started in her current home of Boston, and she found raising money in that environment more of a challenge than it would be in, say, Silicon Valley.
It was difficult to get an introduction without a connection, she said: “I didn't understand what pitches even were but I learned how … to tell the story. That helped out a lot.”
Founding Solo.io was not about coming up with an idea to solve a problem at first. “The main thing at Solo.io, and I think this is the biggest point, is that it's a place for amazing technologists, to deal with technology, and, beyond the top of innovation, figure out how to change the world, honestly,” said Levine.
Even when the focus is software, she believes it’s eventually always about people. “You need to understand what's driving them and make sure that they're there, they are happy. And this is true in your own company. But this is also [true] in the ecosystem in general.”
Levine credits the company’s success with its ability to establish amazing relationships with customers – Solo.io has a renewal rate of 98.9% – using a very different customer engagement model that is similar to users in the open source community. “We’re working together to build the product.”
Throughout her journey, she has carried the idea of a team: in her early beginnings in basketball, in how she established a “no politics” office culture, and even in the way she involves her family with Solo.io.
As for the ever-elusive work/life balance, Levine called herself a workaholic, but suggested that her journey has prepared her for it: “I trained really well. Chaos is a part of my personal life.”
She elaborated, “I think that one way to do this is to basically bring the company to [my] personal life. My family was really involved from the beginning and my daughter chose the logos. They’re all very knowledgeable and part of it.”
Solo.io, with Idit Levine
Solo.io was founded in 2017 by this week's guest, Idit Levine. She talks to Craig and Adam about API gateways, service meshes, and lots of project names with two O's in them.
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Chatter of the week Casa Battlo
Picasso Museum
Dali Museum and Theatre in Figueres
MoPOP in Seattle The "Beaker Sane" t-shirt
A bottle of Sortilege whisky Gifted to us by Francois LeMessier
Shared with the community at KubeCon
News of the week Announcing SMI SMI Spec website
CNAB and Virtual Kubelet updates from Microsoft
Banzai Cloud Kafka Operator
Razee: multi-cloud CD from IBM
Couchbase Autonomous Kubernetes Operator 1.2
Rio, a MicroPaaS from Rancher Labs
Atlassian Software for Kubernetes from Praqma
Kyma goes 1.0
Intuit win the CNCF End User Award
CapitalOne make their Kubernetes platform available
Links from the interview Solo.io
Gloo Envoy Proxy
SuperGloo
SMI
GlooShot
Service Mesh Hub
Flagger by Weaveworks
Chaos Debugging talk from KubeCon EU; discussing Loop
Knative Using Gloo in Knative
Idit Levine on Twitter