MASCOM PODCAST: TREĆI SVET

Kubernetes has become the dominant container orchestration platform, used by more than 80% of container users, but widespread adoption hasn’t eliminated tensions between developers and operations teams. Developers value Kubernetes for its self-service capabilities and ability to move quickly, while operations teams prioritize stability, governance and controlled change. In this episode, HPE Fellow David Estes explains how those competing priorities are becoming more challenging as applications spread across hybrid and edge environments and AI inference workloads increase demand for GPU scheduling and rapid capacity scaling.

Open-source technology has played a foundational role in the AI boom, giving companies the flexibility to scale unprecedented computing workloads across providers and hardware. OpenAI, for example, used Kubernetes as early as 2018 to balance compute across its own data centers, AWS and Azure — years before ChatGPT brought generative AI into the mainstream.

Dynatrace sells software that monitors companies’ apps and infrastructure and wants its AI agents to make engineers’ jobs easier. An agent that gets in the way is a bad agent and should be dropped, said Sean O’Dell, a principal product marketing manager at the company.

For many developers, turning an AI-generated prototype into maintainable software requires more than generating code—it requires infrastructure, collaboration, testing and review. In this episode of The New Stack podcast, Bit Cloud founder and CEO Ran Mizrahi discusses Bit Cloud 2.0 and Hope, the company’s AI builder, and how they connect application creation with the work that follows.

CloudBees CEO Mo Plassnig is leading the CI/CD company through a major transformation as generative AI reshapes software development. Returning to CloudBees eight years after joining through its acquisition of CodeShip, which he co-founded, Plassnig says the emergence of generative AI renewed his interest in DevOps and the opportunities ahead.

The AI industry has faced a growing enterprise dilemma: companies want access to powerful proprietary AI models without risking sensitive data or intellectual property, while AI labs want to protect their model weights from being exposed to customers. Traditionally, businesses had to choose between proprietary models with potential data-leakage concerns or open-weight models that lagged behind the frontier. Vast Data co-founder Jeff Denworth argues that a new approach can address both sides of the trust problem.

Harness Field CTO Martin Reynolds joins The New Stack to talk about what happens after coding agents start opening pull requests faster than anyone can review them. He explains how he first saw the bottleneck during early GitHub Copilot trials, the three ways enterprises are coping with the volume now, and why Harness rebuilt its Code Repository and launched AI Code Review for agent traffic. The conversation also covers GitHub's recent outages, the software delivery knowledge graph behind Harness's reviewer, and how much of the delivery pipeline should stay deterministic.

Traces provide a detailed view of a request’s journey through data, microservices and applications, helping SREs pinpoint where failures occur and resolve issues faster. But while tracing can reduce downtime and developer burnout, collecting every trace creates its own problems. Storing massive volumes of data is expensive, can burden the systems being monitored and makes it harder to find the information that actually matters.

As AI evolves from conversational chatbots to autonomous agents, CPUs are becoming an increasingly important part of the infrastructure equation. In this episode, The New Stack speaks with Bhumik Patel of Arm and Mo Farhat of Google about how CPUs act as an “air traffic controller” for agentic workloads, handling orchestration, data preparation, semantic search, vector databases, code execution and API calls alongside GPUs and TPUs. Smaller AI models, including summarizers and evaluators, can also run effectively on CPUs for specialized tasks.

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.

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 of The New Stack podcast, Sam Farid and Nate Heinrich of Chronosphere, a Palo Alto Networks Company, argue that AI agents should also be used for root-cause analysis, helping teams diagnose failures more quickly as model capabilities continue to improve.

In this episode with The New Stack's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 CTO Eddie Kim witnessed 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.

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.

At a recent MCP developer summit, The New Stack spoke with Till Döhmen, AI lead at MotherDuck, about the company’s growing role in the evolving DuckDB ecosystem. Backed by investors including Tomasz Tunguz, MotherDuck is commercializing the open-source analytical database DuckDB while also expanding how employees interact with data through AI agents rather than traditional dashboards.

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 development Mikhail Vink argued that competitors such as Microsoft Copilot, Anysphere Cursor, and Windsurf are all tied to either AI labs or cloud providers. By contrast, JetBrains says its independence allows customers to switch freely between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Cloud without being locked into one ecosystem.

What began as an internal developer tool at Block has 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 into Amazon Web Services. After deploying Goose companywide, Block open-sourced the tool under a permissive license, leading to rapid adoption across the developer community.

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.

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.

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. As Stephane Erbrech, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft explains, the challenge shifts from deployment to governance—maintaining consistency, security, and compliance across a vast distributed system without manual intervention.

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.

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.

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.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Pete Smails outlines how SUSE is evolving from its Linux roots into an AI-native infrastructure platform. Speaking at KubeCon + 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 is SUSE Rancher Prime, which enables consistent orchestration across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, alongside SUSE Virtualization for modernizing legacy systems.

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.

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. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, Broadcom leaders highlighted how VCF is adapting to support platform engineering teams, cloud-native workloads, and large-scale operations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At KubeCon Europe 2026, Jorge Palma outlined 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.

At the MCP Summit in New York City, Clare Liguori of Amazon Web Services discussed the rapid rise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), now a leading way to connect AI agents with tools and data. Originally developed by Anthropic and later transferred to the Linux Foundation, MCP has seen surging enterprise adoption as agentic AI expands.

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.

In this episode of The 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.

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.

At KubeCon EU 2026, Mitch Connors of Microsoft outlined a vision to make service meshes effectively invisible to users. Now working on Azure Kubernetes Application Network, a fully managed service built on Istio’s ambient mode, Connors aims to deliver core capabilities like mTLS without requiring users to engage with the complexity traditionally associated with service meshes. Ambient mode eliminates sidecar upgrade challenges by shifting functionality to node-level and waypoint proxies, though adoption still faces hurdles, including lagging CVE patching.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, Alex Kestner, principal product manager for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), discussed how Amazon EKS Auto Mode aims to reduce the operational burden of running Kubernetes at scale. While Kubernetes delivers significant power, it also introduces complexity—particularly through repetitive, day-to-day tasks like managing node lifecycles, ensuring security updates, and selecting optimal infrastructure.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, Lena Hall and Thorsten Hans of Akamai outlined how the company is evolving from a CDN provider into a developer-focused cloud platform for AI. Akamai’s strategy centers on low-latency, distributed computing, combining managed Kubernetes, serverless functions, and a distributed AI inference platform to support modern workloads.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow, Brendan Burns discusses how AI is reshaping Kubernetes and modern infrastructure. Originally designed for stateless applications, Kubernetes is evolving to support AI workloads that require complex GPU scheduling, co-location, and failure sensitivity. Features like Dynamic Resource Allocation and projects such as KAITO introduce AI-specific capabilities, while maintaining Kubernetes’ core strength: vendor-neutral extensibility. Burns highlights that AI also changes how systems are monitored. Success is no longer binary; it depends on answer quality, user feedback, and large-scale testing using thousands of prompts and even AI evaluators. On software development, Burns argues that the industry’s focus on reviewing AI-generated code is temporary. Just as developers stopped inspecting compiler output, AI-generated code will become a disposable artifact validated by tests and specifications. This shift will redefine…

In this episode of The New Stack Agents, Marcin Wyszynski, co-founder of Spacelift and OpenTofu, explains how AI is transforming infrastructure as code (IaC). Originally built for individual operators, tools like Terraform struggled to scale across teams, prompting Wyszynski to help launch OpenTofu after HashiCorp’s 2023 license change. Now, the bigger shift is AI: engineers no longer write configuration languages like HCL manually, as AI tools generate it, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry.

Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems, argues that successful enterprise AI deployments rarely rely on standalone agents. Instead, production systems combine AI agents with data, workflows, APIs, applications, and human oversight. While claims that “95% of agent pilots fail” are common, Martin suggests many of those pilots were simply low-commitment experiments made possible by the low cost of testing AI. Enterprises that succeed typically keep humans in the loop, at least initially, to review recommendations and maintain control over decisions.

On a recent episode of the The New Stack Agents, Inception Labs CEO Stefano Ermon introduced Mercury 2, a large language model built on diffusion rather than the standard autoregressive approach. Traditional LLMs generate text token by token from left to right, which Ermon describes as “fancy autocomplete.” In contrast, diffusion models begin with a rough draft and refine it in parallel, similar to image systems like Stable Diffusion.

On The New Stack Agents, Gavriel Cohen discusses why he built NanoClaw, a minimalist alternative to OpenClaw, after discovering security and architectural flaws in the rapidly growing agentic framework. Cohen, co-founder of AI marketing agency Qwibit, had been running agents across operations, sales, and research using Claude Code. When Clawdbot (later OpenClaw) launched, it initially seemed ideal. But Cohen grew concerned after noticing questionable dependencies—including his own outdated GitHub package—excessive WhatsApp data storage, a massive AI-generated codebase nearing 400,000 lines, and a lack of OS-level isolation between agents.

A few weeks after Dynatrace acquired DevCycle, Michael Beemer and Andrew Norris discussed on The New Stack Makers podcast how feature flagging is becoming a critical safeguard in the AI era. By integrating DevCycle’s feature flagging into the Dynatrace observability platform, the combined solution delivers a “360-degree view” of software performance at the feature level. This closes a key visibility gap, enabling teams to see exactly how individual features affect systems in production.

Dynatrace is at a pivotal point, expanding beyond traditional observability into a platform designed for autonomous operations and security powered by agentic AI. In an interview on *The New Stack Makers*, recorded at the Dynatrace Perform conference, Chief Technology Strategist Alois Reitbauer discussed his vision for AI-managed production environments. The conversation followed Dynatrace’s acquisition of DevCycle, a feature-management platform. Reitbauer highlighted feature flags—long used in software development—as a critical safety mechanism in the age of agentic AI.

Matan-Paul Shetrit, Director of Product Management at Writer, argues that people must take responsibility for how they use AI. If someone produces poor-quality output, he says, the blame lies with the user—not the tool. He believes many misunderstand AI’s role, confusing its ability to accelerate work with an abdication of accountability. Speaking on The New Stack Agents podcast, Shetrit emphasized that “we’re all becoming editors,” meaning professionals increasingly review and refine AI-generated content rather than create everything from scratch. However, ultimate responsibility remains human. If an AI-generated presentation contains errors, the presenter—not the AI—is accountable.