Natali Vlatko

In this episode, Kat Cosgrove (SIG Docs Technical Lead, SIG Release Subproject Lead, and Steering Committee member) and Natali Vlatko (SIG Docs Co-Chair, Steering Committee member for the TODO Group, and Open Source Architect at Cisco) join hosts Kaslin Fields and Abdel Sghiouar to discuss the newly published Kubernetes AI usage policy. We dive into the legal and administrative reasoning behind the policy—including why AI tools cannot legally sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or co-author PRs—and explore how maintainers manage the influx of "AI slop" PRs, spam comments, and restricted AI note-taker bots in community meetings. The discussion highlights the balance between human accountability and AI as an enhancer, while sharing actionable advice on how new contributors can sustainably get involved with SIG Docs, issue wrangling, and the Kubernetes Release Team. Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: web: kubernetespodcast.com mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com twitter: @kubernetespod bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com News of the week Apple Native Container Tool for macOS 1.0: Apple has shipped version 1.0 of its native container tool for macOS. Built in Swift specifically for Apple Silicon, it departs from traditional shared-VM setups like Docker Desktop by isolating every single Linux container inside its own dedicated micro-VM using the native macOS Virtualization framework. Read more on Cloud Native Now. Google OpenRL: Google launched OpenRL, a new open-source project designed to streamline the training and reinforcement learning loops of large language models. The tool brings declarative, Kubernetes-style resource orchestration concepts to the messy process of AI model fine-tuning. Read more on Cloud Native Now. CNCF Welcomes New Members: At KubeCon CloudNativeCon India, the CNCF announced they added 14 new members, end Users, and non-profit organizations, highlighting the continued growth of the Cloud Native Ecosystem. One of the new members is Loveable, who was a recent guest on the show. We highly recommend you go listen to Episode 268 about the Agent Sandbox. Read the full announcement on PR Newswire. Is a Pod the Right Deployment Unit for an AI Agent?: Lin Sun from Solo published a community post on the CNCF blog questioning whether the classic Kubernetes Pod primitive is still the best abstraction for hosting autonomous, long-running AI agents and introducing Agent-substrate, a project attempting to bring a solution to the table. Read more on the CNCF Blog. Links from the interview Kubernetes AI Usage Policy – Read the community's official guidelines and rules for AI-assisted contributions. TODO Group Steering Committee – A Linux Foundation project bringing OSPO professionals and enthusiasts together. Contributor License Agreement (CLA) – Standard agreement required for all human contributors, which AI agents cannot legally sign. Kubernetes SIG Docs – Get involved with the documentation community. SIG Docs Style Guide – Learn the style guidelines for contributing to Kubernetes docs. Kubernetes SIG Release – Details on how to get involved with the release cycle. Links from the post-interview chat Linus Torvalds on AI LinkedIn Post – Torvalds' clarification on using AI as a helper tool rather than writing kernel C++ code. Devoxx– A popular developer conference in Europe Prowbot GitHub Repo – Kubernetes' main CI/CD bot handling PR automation.

Kat Cosgrove

Kubernetes v1.30 Release Lead

Dell TechnologiesJFrog

Natali Vlatko

Global Lead, Open Source Program Office and Senior Software Engineering Manager

WayfairCisco

Wayfair describes itself as the “the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.” It provides an online platform to acquire home furniture, outdoor decor and other furnishings. It also supports its suppliers so they can use the platform to sell their home goods, explained Natali Vlatko, global lead, open source program office (OSPO) and senior software engineering manager, for Wayfair as the featured guest in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022.   “It takes a lot of technical, technical work behind the scenes to kind of get that going,” Vlatko said. This is especially true as Wayfair scales its operations worldwide. The infrastructure must be highly distributed, relying on containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, and especially, open source to get the job done.   “We have technologists throughout the world, in North America and throughout Europe as well,”  Vlatko said. “And we want to make sure that we are utilizing cloud native and open source, not just as technologies that fuel our business, but also as the ways that are great for us to work in now.”   Open source has served as a “great avenue” for creating and offering technical services, and to accomplish that, Vlatko amassed the requite tallent, she said. Vlatko was able to amass a small team of engineers to focus on platform work, advocacy, community management and internally on compliance with licenses.   About five years ago when Vlatko joined Wayfair, the company had yet to go “full tilt into going all cloud native,”  Vlatko said. Wayfair had a hybrid mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. After decoupling from a monolith into a microservices architecture “that journey really began where we understood the really great benefits of microservices and got to a point where we thought, ‘okay, this hybrid model for us actually would benefit our microservices being fully in the cloud,” Vlatko said. In late 2020, Wayfair had made the decision to “get out of the data centers” and shift operations to the cloud, which was completed in October, Vlatko said.    The company culture is such that engineers have room to experiment without major fear of failure by doing a lot of development work in a sandbox environment. “We've been able to create production environments that are close to our production environments so that experimentation in sandboxes can occur. Folks can learn as they go without actually fearing failure or fearing a mistake,”  Vlatko said. “So, I think experimentation is a really important aspect of our own learning and growth for cloud native. Also, coming to great events like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and other events [has been helpful]. We're hearing from other companies who've done the same journey and process and are learning from the use cases.”

Natali Vlatko

Global Lead, Open Source Program Office and Senior Software Engineering Manager

Wayfair