In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conversation from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson sits down with Bobby Allen, Kelsey Hightower and Eric Hanselman to celebrate 10 years of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and its evolution from open-source project to production platform. They reflect on how GKE helped normalize cloud around a common Kubernetes API, gave Google Cloud new enterprise relevance and became a foundation for modern AI workloads by abstracting away much of the infrastructure complexity. The discussion also spotlights GKE’s next chapter, from running clusters with up to 130,000 nodes and supporting agentic workloads to features such as Autopilot, pod snapshots and an agentic sandbox that protect existing applications while enabling experimentation. Allen’s “croissant in the air fryer” analogy captures how AI is transforming what’s possible on top of Kubernetes, while Hightower and Hanselman describe a future where Kubernetes becomes largely invisible – an open, ecosystem-driven “platform for platforms” that increasingly powers both digital services and real-world, mission-critical systems.