Will AI help or hinder a developer’s experience with an internal platform? At KubeCon EU, the audience found out. My bestie Viktor Farcic (Upbound) and I ran an interactive session where attendees voted at key moments on which tools our AI agent would use. I built the demo to work with any combination they chose, on the fly.
The agent investigated a broken app, used semantic search to navigate cluster resources, and deployed on a developer’s behalf, with no cluster access required. Expect surprises, stumbles, and a real conversation about what AI is (and isn’t) ready for in platform engineering.
At Cloud Native AI Day (KubeCon EU), Thomas Vitale (Systematic) and I co-presented a live demo where audience votes drove real-time canary rollouts for GenAI apps using OpenTelemetry and Flagger.
“We go through our Kubernetes clusters and we’re killing nodes every 2 minutes in production constantly.”
At Google Cloud Next, I hosted a fireside chat with David Faircloth (VP of Architecture and Engineering at Wendy’s) about how Wendy’s scaled to 99.95% availability in five years.
Wendy’s built their way there by designing systems to fail gracefully. Observability is what made that strategy visible, and chaos engineering is what proved it out in production.
“I just Googled Kubernetes and I know more than you do.”
An investor actually said that to Emily Long’s all-woman founding team during a pitch!
In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera, talks about building a hardened container runtime that secures infrastructure foundations instead of chasing detect-and-respond alerts, and what it’s like raising a deep-tech Series A when investors have opinions like that one.
At Observability Day, KubeCon EU, I presented Spinybacked Orbweaver, an AI agent that automatically instruments your JavaScript code with OpenTelemetry using OTel Weaver as the standards contract.
“I’ve done migrations similar to this before we had these kind of tools and it was a very different world.”
In this episode of Datadog Illuminated, Nick Isaacs, engineer on Datadog’s AI DevX team, walks through the LLM-powered workflow his team built to migrate thousands of HTTP endpoints out of Datadog’s webapp monolith into microservices.
The system pairs Claude Code for transformation with GPT-5 for code review, orchestrated by LangGraph, with a self-correcting verification loop that runs the type checker, tests, and server start and fixes its own errors before a human sees the PR.
“When I talk to people from projects who are really struggling with this, it’s because they never had systems to deal with low-quality contributions to begin with.”
In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Josh Berkus, Kubernetes community architect at Red Hat, explains why AI-generated contributions haven’t created a crisis for Kubernetes, even though they have for other projects.
Spoiler alert: projects that invested in contributor triage, automated tests, and onboarding years ago are absorbing the AI-contribution onslaught.
Humans have had identity solutions for years. For example, passwords, two-factor auth, and SSO. But what about services? They need identity too, especially now, with AI agents in the mix.
In this 🌩️Thunder episode, Henry Avetisyan, Software Engineer at Yahoo and lead maintainer of Athenz, explains how Athenz issues every workload a short-lived certificate as its identity, valid for mere hours, and how that cert gets refreshed automatically.
When something is compromised, you stop renewing. The certificate expires on its own.
