The New Stack Podcast is all about the developers, software engineers and operations people who build at-scale architectures that change the way we develop and deploy software.
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Doist CTO Gonçalo Silva says AI is reshaping software development, but success depends on restraint rather than rapid feature expansion. Instead of chasing every AI capability, Doist prioritizes “subtraction over addition,” removing features that fail to deliver lasting value despite development investment. After experimenting with nearly 20 AI concepts, the company found success with Ramble, an AI-powered voice task capture feature, while remaining model-agnostic through rigorous testing and evaluations.
Internally, developers use a variety of AI coding tools rather than standardizing on one platform, while Doist OS—a companywide AI assistant with nearly 100 shared skills—helps employees across all functions work more effectively. Silva also outlined Doist’s approach to AI-powered automations, separating AI-driven workflow generation from deterministic execution to improve reliability and reduce token costs. Throughout its AI strategy, the company emphasizes purposeful features, privacy, transparency, and continuous improvement, ensuring AI enhances user productivity without compromising product quality or trust.
Learn more from The New Stack around developer productivity:
Developer Productivity in 2025: More AI, but Mixed Results
Optimizing for Developer Productivity Creates a Winning DevEx
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As AI coding agents accelerate software development, they also create new challenges for site reliability engineers (SREs), who are increasingly responsible for debugging systems that no single human fully understands. In this episode ofThe New Stackpodcast, Sam Farid and Nate Heinrich of Chronosphere argue that AI agents should also be used for root-cause analysis, helping teams diagnose failures more quickly as model capabilities continue to improve.
Rather than immediately purchasing a commercial solution, they recommend organizations first build an in-house AI SRE. The process of documenting systems, dependencies, and operational knowledge creates valuable context that enables AI agents to troubleshoot effectively while improving institutional knowledge. Although Chronosphere offers its own AI SRE platform, the hosts emphasize that building an internal prototype helps teams understand their needs before evaluating vendor tools. As AI-generated code becomes more common, organizations that invest in mapping their systems and leveraging AI for operations will be better equipped to reduce downtime and support increasingly complex software environments.
Learn more from The New Stack around AI SREs:
5 ways SRE AI agents are set to augment human capabilities
The Future of AI in SRE: Preventing Failures, Not Fixing Them
AI Reliability Engineering: Welcome to the Third Age of SRE
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In this episode with The New Stack Agents, Frederic Lardinois, NVIDIA’s Joey Conway says advances in AI over the past year have dramatically improved the capabilities of local models, making them practical for enterprise and personal use alongside frontier cloud models. Rather than replacing large models, Conway envisions a “system of models” where specialized local models handle routine, cost-sensitive, or privacy-focused tasks, while larger frontier models tackle more complex reasoning. He explains that organizations can fine-tune smaller open models using domain-specific data, creating expert AI agents that reflect the specialized roles found within businesses.
NVIDIA supports this ecosystem through open models, training tools, and software such as NeMo, Dynamo, and Nemotron. Conway also highlights the growing importance of agentic harnesses, which give AI models access to tools, memory, and iterative workflows, significantly improving performance and reducing costs. Looking ahead, he expects AI orchestration to become increasingly important, with intelligent routing systems selecting the right model for each task based on complexity, cost, latency, and data governance requirements, enabling enterprises to balance performance, security, and efficiency.
Learn more from The New Stack around NVIDIA's latest updates in AI:
Palantir and Nvidia want to change who owns government AI
Nvidia's best model is now live
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In this episode, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure revealed Brain, the AI-powered AIOps system that continuously monitors Azure’s health, detects incidents, identifies root causes, and increasingly automates responses such as pausing problematic deployments and notifying affected customers. Built on Azure Resource Graph, Brain creates a real-time digital twin of Azure, mapping dependencies across hundreds of services, data centers, and regions. Although Brain predates the generative AI boom, years of data engineering, standardized service-level indicators (SLIs), and machine learning laid the foundation for today’s capabilities.
Brain combines standardized SLIs, service-specific monitoring, and third-party signals to detect anomalies, while ML models dynamically establish service baselines and correlate outages with software rollouts. Microsoft says automated notifications have reduced customer support tickets by four to six times, with 80–90% of Brain-covered services receiving notifications within 15 minutes, often in under five. The company is also layering LLM-powered agents, called Triangle, on top of Brain to streamline incident routing and eventually enable AI agents to autonomously troubleshoot and remediate outages.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in Microsoft Azure:
Meet Brain, the AI that decides when Azure is officially down
Microsoft's pitch to enterprises: Ditch Azure Repos for GitHub, despite its rocky reliability record
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Subquadratic is beginning to back up its ambitious claims with benchmarks and third-party validation for its SubQ 1.1 Small model, which uses its proprietary Sparse Attention (SSA) architecture to dramatically improve long-context performance. Rather than comparing every token to every other token, SSA selectively processes relationships, enabling near-linear scaling while maintaining high accuracy across context windows of up to 12 million tokens. The company reports near-perfect retrieval performance, competitive coding and reasoning benchmarks, and compute savings of up to 1,000x at maximum context lengths.
Rather than targeting frontier models immediately, Subquadratic is focusing on enterprise customers that need efficient analysis of massive datasets. The current model was built by replacing the dense attention mechanism in an existing open-weight model and then continuing long-context pretraining. Looking ahead, the startup plans to release a larger mid-tier model while continuing research into "zero attention" architectures that could eliminate attention mechanisms altogether, with the long-term goal of surpassing today's transformer-based AI models in both efficiency and capability.
Learn more from The New Stack around cloud spending:
The context window has been shattered: Subquadratic debuts a 12-million-token window
What comes after attention? This startup says it already knows.
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Harness has introduced Autonomous Worker Agents, a new capability that allows enterprises to replace rigid CI/CD pipeline scripts with AI agents that can deploy applications, run tests, and perform security scans while operating under existing governance, security, and audit controls. Unlike Harness' existing expert agents, which assist developers with coding and pipeline creation, Worker Agents autonomously execute pipeline tasks within customer-controlled infrastructure. Agents are defined using simple Markdown files, draw context from the Harness Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, and run in sandboxed environments with scoped permissions and policy enforcement.
Harness also provides built-in audit trails that record prompts, decisions, and outcomes, along with token budgets and approval gates to control AI costs. The launch includes an Agent Marketplace featuring Harness-managed, certified partner, and community-built agents. CEO Jyoti Bansal said production AI agents require far stronger safeguards than coding assistants, positioning Harness' governance and knowledge graph as key differentiators. Looking ahead, the company envisions fully autonomous software engineering, where AI agents manage the software lifecycle while humans oversee high-risk decisions.
Learn more from The New Stack around AI software delivery:
AI won't speed up software delivery - nothing has
How to solve the AI paradox in software development with intelligent orchestration
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More than two decades after AWS helped usher in the public cloud era, many organizations are reassessing whether a cloud-first strategy still delivers the cost and operational benefits it once promised. While hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have built enormously successful businesses, cloud spending has become a growing concern for customers as usage expands and costs continue to rise.
On this episode of The New Stack Makers, Summit’s Byron Dill argues that many enterprises have become overly reliant on public cloud infrastructure, using it for workloads that may be better suited to private environments. Rather than treating the cloud as a one-size-fits-all solution, Dill advocates for a more segmented approach that places workloads where they make the most sense based on cost, security and management requirements.
The conversation draws parallels to the rapid adoption of AI, where organizations often discover unexpected costs after implementation. Dill explores when repatriating workloads from the public cloud to private infrastructure can reduce expenses, simplify data management and improve control, while examining the costs, timelines and industries best positioned to benefit from a private cloud strategy.
Learn more from The New Stack around cloud spending:
How to Cut Cloud Waste Without Constricting Developer Productivity
AI agents need to spend money — Stripe and iWallet are building the rails
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Gusto is betting that small businesses need more than another AI assistant. The company’s new product, Gusto Cofounder, is designed to act as a proactive business partner that helps owners manage and grow their companies, drawing inspiration from the traditional mom-and-pop partnership that co-founder and CTOEddie Kimwitnessed growing up. Unlike reactive chatbots, Cofounder can take action across payroll, HR, benefits, scheduling, insurance, and accounting workflows by leveraging data already stored within Gusto.
Users interact with the platform through text messages or Slack, while a consent framework ensures access to sensitive payroll and employee data remains tightly controlled. Businesses can grant explicit permissions and gradually increase autonomy as trust is established. The platform also integrates with third-party tools such as Google Workspace, enabling it to gather data, perform calculations, run payroll, and communicate results automatically.
Kim said the product was built by a five-person team in just eight weeks using Claude Code, which he believes demonstrates how AI is expanding software creation beyond traditional engineering roles. Looking ahead, Gusto plans to add more integrations and eventually enable customers and developers to share reusable, industry-specific business automations.
Learn more from The New Stack around how AI is expanding software creation beyond traditional engineering roles:
How AI Is Reshaping Software Engineering: Key Takeaways From DeveloperWeek 2025
AI and the Future of Code: Developers Are Key
The Engineer in the AI Age: The Orchestrator and Architect
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WeAreDevelopers, the Berlin-based developer conference founded in 2015, has grown into a major global event, attracting 15,000 developers from over 70 countries each year. In 2026, it expands beyond Europe with new editions in San Jose, California, and Bengaluru, India. Co-founder and CEO Sead Ahmetovic says the conference was created to give developers a stronger voice in an industry where marketers, salespeople, and entrepreneurs often receive more recognition.
He believes developers, despite being less vocal, build the products that power the modern world. The event began as a small meetup that quickly gained popularity, filling a gap between highly specialized technical gatherings and broader business-focused conferences. Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke highlights another benefit: giving developers a platform to share the stories behind their work and inspire peers.
Discussing the future of software development, Dohmke predicts AI agents will handle much of the coding, while developers focus on managing ideas, prompts, and workflows. Ahmetovic agrees, arguing that developers will remain essential, spending less time typing code and more time thinking, orchestrating, and creating new solutions.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in developer community growth:
How Community Helps Developers Grow
Empowering Developers Is Critical to Drive AI Innovation
3 Ways Organizations Can Redefine the Developer Experience
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At a recent MCP developer summit, The New Stack spoke with Till Döhmen, AI lead atMotherDuck, about the company’s growing role in the evolving DuckDB ecosystem. Backed by investors includingTomasz Tunguz, MotherDuck is commercializing the open-source analytical databaseDuckDBwhile also expanding how employees interact with data through AI agents rather than traditional dashboards.
Döhmen emphasized the company’s close collaboration withDuckDB FoundationandDuckDB Labs. Because MotherDuck operates what he described as the world’s largest fleet of DuckDB databases, the startup regularly pushes the database to its limits and feeds insights back to the core maintainers. Rather than forking DuckDB to create proprietary advantages, MotherDuck instead extends the platform through its existing architecture while contributing core improvements upstream when needed.
The conversation highlighted the delicate but productive relationship between venture-backed companies and the open-source projects they commercialize, positioning MotherDuck as another example of startups driving both OSS adoption and strong business growth simultaneously.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in DuckDB:
DuckDB: Query Processing Is King
DuckDB: In-Process Python Analytics for Not-Quite-Big Data
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JetBrains is positioning itself as the last major independent AI coding-tool vendor in a market increasingly tied to hyperscalers and foundation model labs. Speaking at Google Cloud Next, JetBrains VP of business developmentMikhail Vink argued that competitors such as Microsoft Copilot, Anysphere Cursor, and Windsurfare all tied to either AI labs or cloud providers. By contrast, JetBrains says its independence allows customers to switch freely between models fromOpenAI,Anthropic, andGoogle Cloudwithout being locked into one ecosystem.
That flexibility underpins JetBrains’ broader AI strategy. Rather than building its own foundation model, the company is focusing on orchestration and governance through JetBrains Central, announced in March as a management layer for AI agents, usage controls, analytics, and consumption-based billing. Vink said the company’s profitability, 16 million users, and 300,000 commercial customers from its long-running IDE business have allowed it to remain venture-free and model-neutral. JetBrains argues that as developers increasingly swap between AI models, neutrality may become more valuable than owning the models themselves.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in AI coding-tools:
JetBrains ‘Agentic’ AI Agent Helps Automate Coding Tasks
JetBrains: AI agents are about to repeat the cloud ROI crisis
JetBrains names the debt AI agents leave behind
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What began as an internal developer tool atBlockhas evolved into a broader open-source initiative with industry backing. Goose, Block’s AI coding agent, followed a path similar to Amazon’s transformation of internal infrastructure intoAmazon Web Services. After deploying Goose companywide, Block open-sourced the tool under a permissive license, leading to rapid adoption across the developer community.
But according to Manik Surtani, Office of the CTO, Block and Co Founder of Agentic AI Foundation, early momentum exposed governance challenges. Although Goose was technically open source, Block retained trademark ownership, creating concerns for enterprises seeking truly independent governance. To address this, the team partnered with the creators ofAnthropicand the Model Context Protocol community to establish theAgentic AI Foundationunder the umbrella of theLinux Foundation.
Goose, MCP, and Agents.MD became the foundation’s initial projects, chosen largely to accelerate the launch of the new organization and create a collaborative ecosystem around agentic AI development.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in open-source AI:
Anthropic extends MCP with a UI framework
Why the Linux Foundation adopted MCP, with Jim Zemlin and Mazin Gilbert
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At Google Cloud Next 2026, Fivetran Chief Product Officer Anjan Kundavaram argued that enterprise data systems are unprepared for the scale of AI-driven analytics. Unlike humans, AI agents can generate exponentially more queries, often routing them through the same expensive compute infrastructure. Kundavaram compared it to “using a Lamborghini to mow the lawn.” To address this, Fivetran introduced its “Open Data Infrastructure” vision and a benchmark designed to expose hidden AI workload costs in closed ecosystems.
Kundavaram said agents can optimize for cost instead of speed, choosing cheaper compute engines when appropriate — but only in open architectures with multiple options. Closed systems force every query through high-cost paths. He also warned that fragmented data and weak context create a “triple whammy” of poor AI responses, soaring analytics bills, and wasted compute. While many organizations respond by tightening controls, Kundavaram argued the better path is investing in open infrastructure, interoperability, and strong semantic data practices before AI costs spiral further.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in enterprise data systems:
Enterprise AI Success Demands Real-Time Data Platforms
AI Agents Are Morphing Into the 'Enterprise Operating System'
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At Google Cloud Next 2026, Finout co-founder and CEO Roi Ravhon and Google Cloud FinOps lead Pathik Sharma discussed how FinOps is rapidly evolving for the AI era. Ravhon argued that while cloud FinOps had a decade to mature, AI economics are forcing the industry to adapt within a year. Unlike traditional cloud workloads, AI costs are unpredictable because token usage varies even for identical prompts, while advanced reasoning models consume significantly more tokens despite falling prices.
Both emphasized that effective AI FinOps requires intelligent orchestration, routing workloads to the cheapest capable models instead of defaulting to expensive frontier models. Sharma noted that AI costs extend beyond APIs to GPUs, storage, training, and organizational adoption. They also cautioned against relying solely on LLMs for operational automation. Deterministic systems, observability metrics, and human approvals remain essential guardrails. Ultimately, both stressed that FinOps is primarily an organizational and cultural discipline, recommending newcomers start with the FinOps Foundation before investing in tools.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in FinOps:
Why FinOps Isn’t About Saving Money
FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS 1.2 Expands to SaaS, PaaS
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Managing Kubernetes at fleet scale introduces significant complexity, especially as organizations expand from a few clusters to hundreds or thousands across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. While GitOps remains the dominant model for declarative management, its traditional one-to-one repository-to-cluster approach struggles to handle multi-cluster realities such as global traffic routing, shared secrets, and unified observability. AsStephane Erbrech, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoftexplains, the challenge shifts from deployment to governance—maintaining consistency, security, and compliance across a vast distributed system without manual intervention.
This need is amplified by the rise of AI workloads at the edge, where inference is increasingly decentralized. To address these challenges,Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Fleet Managerenables coordinated, staged rollouts across clusters, allowing teams to validate updates in lower-risk environments before production. Supporting this,Cilium Cluster Meshprovides seamless cross-cluster connectivity, enabling workload mobility and efficient resource use, especially for scarce GPU capacity. Together, these tools help modern platform teams manage lifecycle, networking, and orchestration at scale.
Learn more from The New Stack around managing Kubernetes at fleet scale:
KubeFleet: The Future of Multicluster Kubernetes App Management
Why Microsoft is betting on temporary identities to stop autonomous agents from going rogue
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In this episode ofThe New Stack Makers, Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably, explains how infrastructure originally built for human collaboration is now well-suited for long-running AI agents. While Ably initially resisted positioning itself as an AI company, the rise of agents that reason, call tools, and operate over extended periods revealed a natural fit for its real-time communication platform.
O’Riordan highlights the limitations of HTTP for these use cases. While effective for short, request-response interactions, HTTP struggles with persistent, stateful experiences—such as handling dropped connections, multi-device usage, or mid-task interruptions. To address this, a new “durable session” layer is emerging, enabling continuous synchronization between agents and users through shared state, presence, and recovery mechanisms.
Ably’s solution, AI Transport, augments existing architectures by keeping HTTP for requests while shifting responses to durable sessions. Features like mutable message streams and “live objects” allow seamless reconnection and collaboration. The goal is to provide a drop-in layer that developers can adopt without rethinking their stack—moving beyond traditional pub/sub models.
Learn more from The New Stack around Ably and AI Transport:
How MCP Uses Streamable HTTP for Real-Time AI Tool Interaction
Ably Touts Real-Time Starter Kits for Vercel and Netlify
AI Agents Need Help. Here’s 4 Ways To Ship Software Reliably
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Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, with open-source projects racing to keep pace with real-world deployment. To accelerate progress, the Linux Foundation consolidated key technologies—Model Context Protocol (MCP), Goose, and AGENTS.md—under the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) in late 2025. At the MCP Dev Summit in New York City, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin and newly appointed AAIF executive director Mazin Gilbert discussed this transition. Zemlin explained that leading both organizations was unsustainable, prompting a careful search for a leader with both technical expertise and collaborative leadership skills.
Gilbert now takes on the challenge of guiding AAIF as it shapes the emerging agentic AI ecosystem. While the foundation currently oversees three projects, its broader mission involves defining the future architecture of agent-driven systems—deciding what to build, when, and why. These decisions will influence the trajectory of open-source AI development. The conversation also highlights the importance of open collaboration, funding dynamics, and early adopters in shaping the agentic stack’s evolution.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in open-source projects and The Linux Foundation:
Anthropic Donates the MCP Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation
SAFE-MCP, a Community-Built Framework for AI Agent Security
Google Donates the Agent2Agent Protocol to the Linux Foundation
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Kubernetes is rapidly emerging as the de facto operating system for AI, with two-thirds of organizations using it for generative AI inference and 82% adopting it in production. Its ecosystem — including tools like Kubeflow — enables organizations to build, scale, and retain control of AI systems through open, community-driven infrastructure. Bob Killen of CNCF and Liam Bollmann-Dodd of SlashData shared insights from recent reports showing that AI success still hinges on strong engineering fundamentals—especially internal developer platforms and overall developer experience.
While AI-generated code accelerates development, it shifts bottlenecks to DevOps, reliability, and security, increasing operational complexity. As a result, operator experience and well-defined guardrails have become critical to safely scaling AI. These controls help constrain both human and AI developers, reducing risk while enabling speed. At the same time, organizations are evolving team structures, expanding platform engineering groups to support internal users more effectively. Despite growing complexity, the core lesson remains consistent: open source innovation thrives on people, processes, and collaboration as much as on technology itself.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in Kubernetes and its emergence as an operating system for AI:
Kubernetes and AI: Are They a Fit?
How AI Is Pushing Kubernetes Storage Beyond Its Limits
Kubernetes and AI Are Shaping the Next Generation of Platforms
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In this episode ofThe New Stack Makers,Pete Smailsoutlines howSUSEis evolving from its Linux roots into an AI-native infrastructure platform. Speaking atKubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, Smails explains the company’s strategy to unify AI, containers and virtual machines on a single open, enterprise-ready foundation. Central to this isSUSE Rancher Prime, which enables consistent orchestration across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, alongsideSUSE Virtualizationfor modernizing legacy systems.
A key innovation is “Liz,” a context-aware AI agent embedded in Rancher Prime that helps engineers identify vulnerabilities, troubleshoot deployments and interact with infrastructure using natural language. Unlike generic AI tools, Liz understands real-time cluster states and uses Model Context Protocol to deliver actionable insights.
Smails emphasizes developer experience as critical to adoption, highlighting Rancher Developer Access for simplified local Kubernetes workflows. Overall, SUSE aims to deliver secure, automated infrastructure that reduces complexity while accelerating cloud-native and AI adoption.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest around SUSE:
SUSE Displays Enhanced Enterprise Linux at SECESSION
SUSE Launches a Sovereign Premium Support Service for EU Customers
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In this episode of The New Stack Makers, AWS developer advocate Morgan Willis demonstrates Strands Agents, an open source agentic framework with rapid adoption since its launch. Using a simple accounting API, she walks through three approaches to retrieving a customer’s latest invoice, highlighting how design choices dramatically impact efficiency. The initial method maps each API endpoint to a separate tool, requiring five chained calls and consuming about 52,000 tokens. By shifting to intent-based tools—focused on outcomes rather than individual data operations—the same task is completed in a single call using just 2,000 tokens, improving both efficiency and reasoning.
In a third iteration, tools are hosted on a remote MCP server via AWS Agent Core Gateway, with semantic search limiting the agent’s toolset to only what’s relevant per query, further reducing token usage. Willis emphasizes that narrowly scoped agents outperform general-purpose ones, delivering better speed, accuracy, and context efficiency. Designing smaller, specialized agents with tailored tools is key as tool ecosystems expand.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest with Strands and MCP:
AWS Launches Its Take on an Open Source AI Agents SDK
What Is MCP? Game Changer or Just More Hype?
MCP’s biggest growing pains for production use will soon be solved
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Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is evolving from a turnkey infrastructure stack into a modern application platform, balancing simplicity with the flexibility demanded by Kubernetes-driven environments. AtKubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, Broadcom leaders highlighted how VCF is adapting to support platform engineering teams, cloud-native workloads, and large-scale operations.
A key industry shift is the return to private cloud, driven by data sovereignty concerns and the growing impact of AI. Enterprises are bringing workloads back on-premises while still expecting a cloud-like operating model. Broadcom is responding by prioritizing on-prem stability and aligning closely with open source, reflecting its strong contributions toKubernetesand related projects.
Kubernetes is no longer a bolt-on but the core control plane of VCF, enabling unified management of compute, storage, and networking through declarative APIs. At the same time, the distinction between virtual machines and containers is fading. The focus is shifting toward application-centric platforms, where developers interact through consistent abstractions, allowing infrastructure to be provisioned seamlessly behind the scenes.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest around Broadcom:
Broadcom ‘Doubles Down’ on Open Source, Donates Kubernetes Tool to CNCF
Why Broadcom gave Velero to the CNCF Sandbox — and what it means for Kubernetes data protection
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Broadcom continues to expand its role as a major contributor to cloud-native open source, particularly within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem. Its recent donation of Velero—originally developed by VMware—to the CNCF Sandbox reflects a strategic move to foster broader community trust and collaboration. By shifting governance away from vendor control, Broadcom aims to position Velero as a truly community-driven data protection standard for Kubernetes environments, encouraging wider adoption and contribution.
At the same time, the company is reinforcing its position as a full-stack Kubernetes provider across both cloud-native and private cloud environments. Despite Kubernetes’ dominance, many organizations still struggle with its complexity. Broadcom is addressing this by focusing on lifecycle management, long-term support, and deep integration with existing infrastructure like vSphere.
In a podcast recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, Dilpreet Bindra emphasized that open source success comes not just from code contributions, but also from relinquishing control to empower the broader ecosystem and drive sustainable innovation.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest developments around Velero:
Broadcom donates Velero to CNCF — and it could reshape how Kubernetes users handle backup and disaster recovery
How AI Search Is Supporting Artistic Freedom
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In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Nimisha Asthagiri of Thoughtworks explores why many AI initiatives stall between proof of concept and production. A key issue is that organizations focus on speed—asking how to move faster—rather than rethinking what new capabilities AI actually enables. Successful companies take a systems-thinking approach, investing in organizational literacy and aligning teams around meaningful use cases instead of retrofitting AI into existing workflows.
Asthagiri highlights that core engineering practices are ফিরে to prominence. As AI-generated code increases, so does the risk of “cognitive debt,” where developers lose understanding of their own systems. To counter this, teams are reviving fundamentals like test-driven development, mutation testing, observability, and zero-trust security, especially as autonomous agents contribute to production code.
She also introduces the concept of “dark code”—AI-generated code that may never be used—and argues for more intentional lifecycle management, including ephemeral code. Ultimately, the focus shifts from code itself to specifications, context management, and disciplined engineering practices.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest about system-thinking approaches:
System Two AI: The Dawn of Reasoning Agents in Business
A practical systems engineering guide: Architecting AI-ready infrastructure for the agentic era
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Graduating within the CNCF marks a major milestone for an open source project, signaling not just technical maturity but strong governance, security practices, and widespread adoption. Kyverno, a Kubernetes policy engine, reached this stage after five years — becoming only the 35th project to progress from sandbox to graduation. As co-founder Jim Bugwadia explains, incubation reflects production readiness and adoption, while graduation validates the project’s long-term sustainability and governance rigor.
Originally built to help teams manage Kubernetes complexity through declarative policies, Kyverno has evolved alongside the ecosystem. Its shift to the Kubernetes-native Common Expression Language (CEL) and rising demand driven by AI workloads have expanded its user base beyond regulated industries to mainstream enterprises. With over three billion downloads, it underscores the growing need for automated policy enforcement across development, security, and operations teams.
Commercially, Nirmata maintains a clear boundary between open source and enterprise offerings, focusing on remediation and advanced management. While only 2–5% of users convert, that small percentage becomes meaningful at Kyverno’s scale.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest about Kyverno:
Simplify Kubernetes Security With Kyverno and OPA Gatekeeper
Using the Kyverno CLI to Write Policy Test Cases
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At the MCP Summit in New York City, AWS’s Luca Chang, a Bedrock team member and MCP specification maintainer, discussed the rapid rise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a standard for connecting AI models and agents to tools and data. He explained that MCP’s development is shaped by a diverse group of maintainers who collaboratively prioritize features, balancing major challenges with smaller enhancements that can unlock creative new capabilities. This breadth of perspectives prevents groupthink but makes prioritization difficult, as many ideas compete for limited bandwidth.
Chang highlighted the role of large organizations like Amazon in advancing open source projects. AWS contributions such as Tasks and Elicitations emerged from internal efforts to map cloud services to MCP, revealing gaps in the protocol. Rather than contributing for speed, AWS focuses on real customer use cases, contributing only when clear needs arise. Chang also noted growing demand for MCP servers, while expressing caution about overly specialized, agent-specific implementations that could limit broader interoperability.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in Model Context Protocol (MCP) becoming a standard for connecting AI models and agents to tools and data:
Model Context Protocol: A Primer for the Developers
Beyond the vibe code: The steep mountain MCP must climb to reach production
https://thenewstack.io/model-context-protocol-evolution/
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AtKubeCon Europe 2026,Jorge Palmaoutlined how Microsoft is advancing AI operations across cloud and edge environments. He demonstrated an agent capable of diagnosing, mitigating, and explaining application issues in minutes, highlighting the growing role of agentic operations in Kubernetes.
Palma emphasized that recent progress in tools likeAzure Kubernetes ServiceandAzure Archas made edge AI more practical by bridging cloud and on-prem systems. Kubernetes now acts as the unifying layer, while fleet management automates deployments that previously required manual GitOps workflows.
To address fragmentation in inference engines, Microsoft introducedAI Runway, a standardized API that allows teams to swap underlying engines without changing workflows.
Security remains a core challenge. Palma advocates for tightly scoped, temporary permissions and policy validation for agents, enforced through tools like the Agent Governance Toolkit. This reflects a broader shift: applying cloud-native principles—portability, abstraction, and policy control—to manage the unpredictable nature of AI workloads.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around advancing AI operations across cloud and edge environments
The Future of AI: Hybrid Edge Deployments Are Indispensable
AI Is Coming to the Edge, but It Will Look Different
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At the MCP Summit inNew York City,Clare LiguoriofAmazon Web Servicesdiscussed the rapid rise of theModel Context Protocol(MCP), now a leading way to connect AI agents with tools and data. Originally developed byAnthropicand later transferred to theLinux Foundation, MCP has seen surging enterprise adoption as agentic AI expands.
Liguori highlighted her dual role shaping MCP’s evolving specification, including work on integrating webhooks, events, and notifications to support always-on AI agents. AWS has actively contributed features like Tasks and Elicitations and offers managed MCP servers, positioning itself as both contributor and experimental platform for emerging capabilities.
This collaboration illustrates how corporate involvement can accelerate open-source innovation and adoption. Looking ahead, MCP’s role as connective infrastructure for AI agents is expected to grow, especially as tools become more accessible. With broader adoption of AI development platforms across non-engineering roles, MCP could help extend automation beyond tech teams to businesses of all sizes.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around Model Context Protocol(MCP):
MCP: The Missing Link Between AI Agents and APIs
Beyond the vibe code: The steep mountain MCP must climb to reach production
MCP is everywhere, but don’t panic. Here’s why your existing APIs still matter.
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At KubeCon Europe, Google Cloud’s Jago Macleod and Abdel Sghiouar argued that adopting Arm for Kubernetes workloads has shifted from a complex migration to a practical, low-friction choice. After a year of production use, Google’s custom Arm-based Axion processors—powering C4A and N4A instances—are positioned as broadly viable for most containerized applications, offering strong gains in performance, cost efficiency, and energy usage compared to x86.
Rather than requiring a full overhaul, moving to Arm typically involves recompiling containers for a multi-architecture target and gradually rolling out via Kubernetes practices like canary deployments. While edge cases exist, they are relatively uncommon.
A key enabler is GKE’s compute classes, which allow workloads to express preferences across VM types, turning infrastructure decisions into automated scheduling choices rather than manual provisioning.
Ultimately, the conversation points to a larger constraint: energy. As AI workloads grow, efficiency—measured in “tokens per watt”—is emerging as the defining metric, with cost savings translating directly into greater compute capacity.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest developments around Google’s work with Axion:
Arm: See a Demo About Migrating a x86-Based App to ARM64
Do All Your AI Workloads Actually Require Expensive GPUs?
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In this episode ofThe New Stack Makers, Jesse Butler, principal product manager for AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, shares his vision for simplifying cloud-native computing. Since joining AWS in 2020, Butler has focused on making Kubernetes easier to use, emphasizing open-source as a democratizing force. He highlights the role of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in standardizing and governing open ecosystems while balancing community-driven innovation with commercial contributions.
Butler describes Kubernetes as widely adopted—used in production by around 80% of enterprises—yet still overly complex. His goal is to make it “invisible,” much like Linux, by abstracting and consolidating services. He points to projects like Karpenter, which enables real-time node provisioning for efficient scaling; Kro, which simplifies resource orchestration; and Cedar, a flexible policy engine for fine-grained authorization.
He underscores the importance of open-source contributors, noting their critical yet often underappreciated role. Looking ahead, Butler envisions a future where automation and human collaboration further enhance usability and innovation in open-source software.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
2026 Will Be the Year of Agentic Workloads in Production on Amazon EKS
Amazon EKS Auto Mode wants to end Kubernetes toil — one node at a time
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Running AI models on Kubernetes has historically been inconsistent, with workloads behaving differently across cloud providers due to variations in GPUs, networking, and autoscaling. As organizations move AI from experimentation to production, standardization has become critical. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of The Cloud Native Computing Foundation shared that the Foundation’s Kubernetes AI conformance program aims to solve this by ensuring portability, predictability, and production readiness for AI workloads across environments.
The initiative reflects a broader industry shift: AI is moving from training-heavy workloads to inference at scale, with inference expected to dominate compute usage by the end of the decade. Unlike batch-based training, inference requires real-time, always-on performance, making Kubernetes an attractive platform due to its elasticity, GPU-aware autoscaling, and observability.
The conformance program establishes baseline standards for handling accelerators like GPUs and TPUs, reducing vendor lock-in and simplifying deployment. Early adopters include major cloud providers and ecosystem players, while new projects like llm-d aim to bridge orchestration and inference. As requirements evolve, ongoing collaboration and recertification will ensure the standards stay aligned with real-world needs.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest developments around The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Kubernetes AI conformance program:
CNCF: Kubernetes is ‘foundational’ infrastructure for AI
Kubernetes Gets an AI Conformance Program — and VMware Is Already On Board
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