Tim Hockin is a long term software engineer with Google Cloud and I would argue one of the fathers of Kubernetes. Brandon Royal is a product manager on GKE and has been behind the launch of multiple OSS projects like the Ray Operator for k8s, Agent Sandbox and our topic for today - Agent Substrate.

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News of the week

• Kubernetes 1.37: Garhwal

• Kubernetes Podcast: Kubernetes 1.37 with Dipesh Rawat

• Kubernetes release & maintenance information: https://kubernetes.io/releases/

• BOMHort

• Google Open Source Blog: Adapting open source practices to an AI-first world: A retrospective on 2025

• Kubernetes-security-announce Google Group

• Kubernetes CVE RSS Feed

Links from the interview

• Agent Substrate on GitHub

• Agent Sandbox

• Kubernetes Checkpoint & Restore Working Group

• spiffe.io

• HashiCorp Blog: SPIFFE: Securing the identity of agentic AI and non-human actors

Links from the post-interview chat

• Kubernetes Podcast: Agent Sandbox and Lovable, with Jonathan Grahl

Dipesh Rawat is a Software Developer at IBM, CNCF Ambassador, CNCF Kubestronaut and SIG Docs Tech Lead. A contributor across multiple Kubernetes release cycles, he serves as the Release Lead for Kubernetes v1.37.

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News of the week

• CNCF Announces Kubeflow's Graduation, Solidifying a Standard for Cloud Native AI Operations

• CNCF Announces Graduation of Cloud Native Buildpacks, Advancing the Standard for Container Builds

• Gateway API v1.6: TCPRoute and UDPRoute Graduate to Standard

• KubeCon EU CFP

Links from the interview

• Kubernetes v1.37: Garhwal

• Kubernetes 1.37 Sneak Peak Blog

Niki Manoledaki is a Staff Platform Engineer at Grafana Labs, A CNCF Ambassador and Green Software Foundation Champion, and a core maintainer of Project Kepler. We explore the recent rewrite of Project Kepler and the challenges of measuring sustainability in the era of AI.

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News of the week

• Confidential Containers becomes a CNCF Incubating Project

• KEP-5972 Dynamic Pod Mutation: Optimistic Execution & Hierarchical Resource Delegation

• RedHat - Introducing asago: Open source AI safety and governance orchestration

  • Asago on GitHub

  • Asago website

• KubeCon NA 2026 Schedule

• CNCF Blog: Welcome CoHDI to the CNCF: Evolving Kubernetes into composable disaggregated infrastructures

Links from the interview

• Project Kepler on GitHub

• CNCF Blog: Kepler, re-architected: Improved power accuracy and a community call to action!

• Green Software Foundation

• "Building Green Software" by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, Sara Bergman

• Grafana Labs Blog: How Grafana Labs switched to Karpenter to reduce costs and complexities in Amazon EKS

• GreenIO New York Conference

• AI Energy Score Initiative on Hugging Face

• Dr Sasha Luccioni's: Power hungry processing: Watts driving the cost of AI deployment?

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.

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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.

In this episode we speak to Jonathan Grahl.

Jonathan is the Team Lead of Infrastructure at Lovable where he oversees the platform stack the company runs on. We talked about Kubernetes, Sandboxes and Chocolate.

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News of the week

OpenTelemetry is a CNCF Graduated Project

CNCF TAG Elections

KubeCon India

Kubernetes Community Days global events

Links from the interview

Lovable

Cilium

Etcd

Cloudflare Sandbox

Agent Sandbox (Kubernetes)

OpenClaw

Claude

OpenAI

Bun toolkit for Javascript

gVisor

Firecracker

Kata Containers

Vitess

Ryota Sawada is software engineer at Numtide and the release lead of Kubernetes 1.36 code name Haru. He has over a decade of experience mainly in the finance industry including working on Cloud Native technologies, and outside of Cloud Native, he's been tinkering with Emacs and Nix.

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News of the week

• Etcd version 3.7.0 is out

• Merge Forward Community

• Truepositive

Links from the interview

• Kubernetes 1.35 codename Haru

• Release theme and logo

• Logo designer

• User Namespaces

• Workload API

• Workload Aware Scheduling (WAS)

• DRA features graduating to Stable

• GKE 10 years and SIG Networking, With Antonio Ojea

Guest is Lucy Sweet, a Staff Software engineer at Uber and the lead for the Kubernetes Node Lifecycle Working Group. Imagine trying to move millions of compute cores and thousands of microservices to a brand new platform. All without dropping a single user request, ride, or delivery. Sounds like an absolute logistical nightmare, right? Well, today we are sitting down with someone who actually lived to tell the tale Lucy. In this episode, we are diving deep into Uber's monumental infrastructure journey: moving away from their in-house system to Kubernetes. We'll be unpacking the reality of running at this scale, why it's always DNS and why building things for fun is worth it.

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News of the week

• Broadcom announced donating Velero to the CNCF Sandbox Level

• KubeCon && CloudNativeCon Amsterdam 2026 Transparency report

• Call for Proposals for KubeCon && CloudNativeCon North America 2026 closes May 31

• OpenChoreo v1.0 CNCF Sandbox

Links from the interview

• Lucy on Linkedin

• Lucy's website

• [Article] Migrating Uber's Compute Platform to Kubernetes

• [Lucy Video] Migrating 2 million CPU cores to Kubernetes

• Up: Portable Microservices Ready for the Cloud

• Peloton: Uber's Unified Resource Scheduler for Diverse Cluster Workloads

• Odin: Uber's Stateful Platform

• Uber Batch platform

• Apache Mesos

• Hyrum's Law

• GKE Blue-Green nodepools

• Node Lifecycle Working Group

• Scaling Infrastructure Management with Grail

• kubegpt.org

• Osquery

• Uber Careers

Amie Wei is a Sr. Solutions Engineer at HashiCorp and was the winner of last year's GKE Turns 10 Hackathon. It was Amie's first time entering a hackathon and she ended up bringing the prize home with a Cart-To-Kitchen AI Assistant.

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News of the week

• Kubernetes 1.36 codename Haru is here

• LLM-d is a CNCF Sandbox project

• CNCF Certification Advancement & Recertification Experience program (CARE)

• Agones is a CNCF Sandbox project

Links from the interview

• Amie Wei on LinkedIn

• GKE turns 10 Hackathon

• Hackathon winner announcement

• Online boutique sample

• Bank of Anthos sample

• The Cart-to-Kitchen AI Assistant on GKE

Drew Hagen, the release lead for Kubernetes 1.35, discusses the theme of the release, Timbernetes, which symbolizes resilience and diversity in the Kubernetes community. He shares insights from his experience as a release lead, highlights key features and enhancements in the new version, and addresses the importance of coordination in release management. Drew also touches on the deprecations in the release and the future of Kubernetes, including its applications in edge computing.

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Links from the interview

• Kubernetes v1.35: Timbernetes (The World Tree Release)

Janet Kuo, Staff Software Engineer at Google, explains the new Kubernetes AI Conformance program.

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Intro

• KubeCon North America 2025

• Kubernetes AI Conformance program

News of the Week

• Kubernetes 1.35 release Sneak Peek

• Helm4

• Google Cloud Achieves Massive Kubernetes Scale with 130,000-Node GKE Cluster

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) AI Conformance

• AKS Ingress Nginx Update

• AKS Automatic managed system node pools

• Amazon EKS Introduces New Managed Kubernetes Capabilities for Workload Orchestration

• KubeCon NA 2025 Retrospective: Closed- And Open-Source Battle For The AI-Native Cloud

• CNCF Launches Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program

• Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) Established to Standardize Agent Collaboration

• KServe Joins CNCF as a Sandbox Project

• OpenFGA accepted as CNCF Incubating Project

• Lima accepted as CNCF Incubation Project

• Lima v2.0 Released with Secure AI Workflows

• KubeCon Cloud Native Con Europe 2026

Links from the interview

• Kubernetes Software Conformance program

• kubectl

• Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) API

• Kubernetes WG AI Conformance

• Kubernetes SIG Architecture

• Kubernetes SIG Testing

GKE turned 10 in 2025! In this episode, we talk with GKE PM Gari Singh about GKE's journey from early container orchestration to AI-driven ops. Discover Autopilot, IPPR, and a bold vision for the future of Kubernetes.

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News of the week

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Knative's Graduation

• llm-d 0.3: Wider Well-Lit Paths for Scalable Inference

• vllm-project/semantic-router on github

• Announcing the Certified Meshery Contributor (CMC)

• Introducing Headlamp Plugin for Karpenter - Scaling and Visibility

Links from the interview

• Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard Way

• MiniKube

• Kind

• Docker Compose

• Docker Swarm

• GKE Autopilot

• Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA)

• Google Cloud TPUs

• Node Auto Provisioning (GKE)

• Jax (Machine Learning Framework)

• Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)

• Serverless on Google Cloud

• Grafana

• Prometheus

• Kubectl-ai

• Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

• Kubernetes v1.33: In-Place Pod Resize Graduated to Beta

• In-place Vertical Scaling of Pods - Resize CPU and Memory Resources assigned to Containers

• GKE under the hood: Container-optimized compute delivers fast autoscaling for Autopilot