Name: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025
Start: 2025-11-11T15:00:00.000Z
End: 2025-11-13T22:00:00.000Z

Stu Miniman & Robert Shaw, Red Hat

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Red Hat’s Stu Miniman, senior director of market insights, and Robert Shaw, director of engineering, for a ground-level look at how Kubernetes is becoming the production backbone for AI. Shaw explains why most large language model (LLM) deployments are landing on Kubernetes and unpacks the latest on vLLM and LLMD – two projects hardening inference at both node and cluster scale. He details how vLLM maps the fast-moving open-weight model ecosystem (e.g., Llama series and new entrants like DeepSeek) to diverse accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD, Google TPU, Intel and AWS, while LLMD targets cluster-level optimizations such as load balancing heterogeneous workloads and specializing pre-fill vs. decode phases to boost tokens-per-node.

Miniman connects these innovations to what Red Hat is showcasing at the event: trust and security in the AI era (with projects like SPIFFE/SPIRE and KServe), plus hands-on learning at OpenShift Commons. He highlights community stories from industries such as financial services and public sector (with names like Ford, Morgan Stanley and Northrop Grumman) and underscores how platform engineering, observability and hybrid/edge architectures are evolving to meet demanding AI inference patterns. The conversation also touches on cost and performance economics, why hybrid remains foundational for AI training and inferencing, and how Kubernetes, GitOps and CNCF projects are coalescing to scale real-world AI use cases beyond simple chatbots into agentic applications.

Marcin Wyszynski, Spacelift

As part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Marcin Wyszynski, co-founder and chief research and development officer at Spacelift (and OpenTofu cofounder), to unpack how AI is reshaping infrastructure as code and platform engineering. Wyszynski traces Spacelift’s origins from “multiplayer Terraform” needs to the recent announcement of Spacelift Intent – an experimental, open-source-first capability with a commercial, multiplayer layer. He explains how Intent accelerates day-zero prototyping, imports ClickOps-created resources and even breaks up overstuffed Terraform states. The discussion highlights why governance and policy-as-code guardrails matter when putting large language models in infrastructure as code loops.

Viewers get a preview of what to watch this month in Atlanta: open sign-ups for Intent on the Spacelift platform (post-KubeCon), improvements to Spacelift’s Kubernetes integration and Spacelift’s first in-person IaCConf focused on the future of IaC. Wyszynski underscores a pragmatic approach – extending Terraform/OpenTofu rather than replacing them – enabling teams to move quickly without sacrificing oversight. It’s a timely look at how cloud-native foundations, AI assistance and strong governance can reduce toil as AI workloads scale.

Gleb Budman, Backblaze

TheCUBE’s Rob Strechay kicks off this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America preview with Backblaze CEO and co-founder Gleb Budman, discussing why storage is the cornerstone to proper AI deployment. Budman outlines how Backblaze B2 – an S3-compatible, affordable, high-performance storage platform – is used across the AI pipeline: data collection, labeling, training, inference and logging. He shares how organizations are minimizing the idle time for graphics processing units time by staging data for fast access. Budman highlights B2 Overdrive, described as “the fastest throughput-per-dollar storage,” delivering up to a terabit per second to hyperscalers, neocloud GPU providers or on-premises clusters. Unpredictable AI costs come up in conversation, with Budman emphasizing fixed per-TB pricing and free egress so teams can move data where they need it without surprise charges.

Budman goes on to detail Universal Data Migration, a service that moves data from AWS, Google, Microsoft, on-prem and more into Backblaze while helping to subsidize source egress fees, enabling “land once, use many” strategies across clouds and Kubernetes environments. He also previews Backblaze’s first-ever KubeCon presence at Booth 1742 near Startup Village – complete with a limited-edition Overdrive hot sauce – illustrating how Backblaze is bringing the spice to AI at scale.

Gaurav Saxena, Automotive Industry

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America interview, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay meets with automotive platform engineering leader Gaurav Saxena to discuss how open source is powering large-scale, real-time vehicle platforms. Saxena details why OpenTelemetry sits at the heart of a cloud-agnostic strategy spanning AWS, GCP, Azure and on-premises. By correlating traces, logs and metrics, enterprises get end-to-end visibility across customer journeys – from mobile apps to over-the-air updates in millions of vehicles.

The discussion looks at the practical patterns teams can apply immediately: separating operational vs. analytics data with hot/cold tiering, running large fleets of OpenTelemetry collectors with Kubernetes operators and building zero-trust pipelines with software supply chain security. Saxena explains how inner-source practices align platform and app teams so developers focus on business logic while the platform optimizes placement for cost and latency. The conversation closes with a look ahead to the main Atlanta event, with AI and machine learning revved up and ready to be pushed to the vehicle edge.

Dimitri Vlachos, Spacelift

In this post-KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA interview, Spacelift Chief Marketing Officer Dimitri Vlachos joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss the evolution of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and the emerging role of generative AI in DevOps. Vlachos outlines the friction between the speed of "ClickOps" and the rigorous "ceremony" of GitOps, introducing Spacelift’s new "Intent" solution designed to bridge this gap. The discussion highlights how Intent leverages AI to allow developers to deploy infrastructure via natural language while maintaining essential guardrails and policies set by platform teams, effectively offering speed for prototyping without sacrificing governance.

Vlachos also shares on-the-ground insights from KubeCon regarding the surging adoption of OpenTofu, citing major enterprise implementations by companies such as Fidelity and Cisco. The segment explores the growth of the vendor-neutral IaCConf community and the shift toward a complimentary two-prong deployment model where AI-driven intent works alongside traditional IaC. Vlachos concludes with a look ahead to Salt Lake City, predicting a future where platform engineers focus on critical infrastructure while AI handles rapid, non-critical deployments through open-source innovation.

Dimitri Vlachos Chief Marketing Officer | Spacelift

Bobby Allen, Google

In this special segment celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), host Savannah Peterson sits down with Google’s Bobby Allen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to reflect on the key takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA. Allen shares his highlights from the event in Atlanta, emphasizing the electric atmosphere of the community and the success of the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon. The conversation underscores how the platform has become more accessible than ever, evidenced by a first-time hackathon participant winning the competition by leveraging Gemini to build a winning application. Allen notes that this democratization of technology is allowing users to jump in and build the future without needing decades of legacy experience.

The discussion also explores the technical innovations driving GKE forward, specifically the announcement of the GKE Agentic Sandbox. Allen explains the importance of providing a safe environment for developers to experiment with AI agents without risking their core infrastructure – balancing the need for creativity with operational safety. He further champions GKE Autopilot as a solution for reducing complexity and automating security and scaling, which remains a favorite feature among users. From powering Spotify’s AI DJ to major gaming titles like Street Fighter, Allen illustrates how GKE has evolved into the central nervous system for both digital and physical world experiences.

Bobby Allen Cloud Therapist | Google Cloud

Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch Software Foundation

In this post-KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA interview, Bianca Lewis, executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss the explosive growth and future roadmap of the OpenSearch project. Lewis shares insights from her first few months leading the foundation, highlighting a massive surge in community engagement that has seen contributors grow from 200 to over 3,000 and project downloads hit 1.4 billion. The conversation explores the foundation's transition into "Phase 2," which prioritizes vendor-neutral sustainability and ecosystem scalability with support from major industry players like AWS, SAP and Uber. Lewis also reflects on the energy at KubeCon, noting the industry-wide shift from simple monitoring to complex observability and the critical role OpenSearch plays as an AI-native database.

The discussion dives into specific technical advancements, including the shift to an eight-week release cycle and the new capabilities introduced in version 3.3. Lewis details how the new Discovery tab unifies logs, metrics and traces into a single interface to provide deeper data context, while the general availability of agentic AI empowers non-technical users to query data using natural language. She emphasizes how these innovations are democratizing data access and enabling diverse use cases, from security monitoring to AI application development. Looking ahead, Lewis predicts that despite the rapid pace of AI innovation, the foundational technologies of search and observability will remain essential to enterprise infrastructure.

Bianca Lewis Executive Director | OpenSearch Software Foundation

Alon Horev, Vast Data

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America interview, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay speaks with Alon Horev, co-founder and chief technology officer at Vast Data, to unpack how Kubernetes and cloud-native standards are powering real-time AI at the edge and across hybrid environments. Horev explains why Kubernetes is the “orchestration platform of today” and why open protocols (such as S3 and Kafka) are essential to avoid product lock-in while enabling developer choice and portability.

Horev discusses platform engineering, multi-tenancy and zero-trust as foundations for self-service data pipelines and governance at scale. Lessons learned from open source-centric customers on building consistent platforms across locations are explored, as well as discussions on Vast’s v5.4 data engine update that introduces serverless functions and triggers to invoke compute on data in real time – vital for use cases from retail to smart cities. Horev also breaks down modern Retrieval-Augemented Generation, or RAG, pipelines and vector databases, why enterprises need a consolidated stack to operationalize agentic AI and the centrality of observability for performance, cost and quality – complete with traces and logs to monitor and compare releases without costly re-runs.

Alon Horev Co-Founder and CTO | VAST Data

Victor Williams, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama & Venkat Ramakrishnan, Portworx by Pure Storage

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 kickoff segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay talks with Victor Williams of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama and Venkat Ramakrishnan of Portworx by Pure Storage about moving from traditional virtualization to Kubernetes-based infrastructure. Williams shares how Blue Cross Blue Shield migrated from Red Hat Virtualization to OpenShift Virtualization, replacing a lagging CSI stack with Portworx Enterprise to speed container startups and make VM migrations up to 10x faster, all while reusing existing Hitachi storage to avoid costly hardware refreshes. Ramakrishnan explains how Portworx delivers an infrastructure-agnostic, Kubernetes-native data management layer that runs on third-party arrays and helps organizations modernize off VMware without storage lock-in.

The conversation also spotlights Portworx’s new Kube Data Stores, introduced at this KubeCon to bring VM-style datastore capabilities – such as storage vMotion-like moves, DRS-style automation and failover of entire datastores – into Kubernetes virtualization. Williams describes how this approach strengthens resiliency, security and time to market for healthcare workloads while helping keep member costs down, and Ramakrishnan highlights similar multi-vendor, hybrid cloud deployments where Portworx abstracts storage across data centers and clouds so customers can scale Kubernetes environments more efficiently and on their own terms.

Venkat Ramakrishnan President and COO | NeuBird AI

Victor Williams Infrastructure Engineering Consultant | Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama

Jimmy Alvarez & Shane Utt, Red Hat

In this conversation from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Red Hat’s Shane Utt (senior principal software engineer) and Jimmy Alvarez (senior principal product marketing manager) to unpack Day Zero takeaways and the latest OpenShift momentum. The duo recaps a jam-packed OpenShift Commons alongside co-located events like SecurityCon, Backstage, IstioCon and EnvoyCon – highlighting real customer stories (including Ford motorsports) and early signals on what’s next for cloud-native networking. They mark the “released today” milestone for OpenShift 4.20 – with OpenShift AI 3.0 on 4.20 – framing AI as “another workload” that benefits from an end-to-end platform: data sovereignty features, monitoring and networking enhancements that keep GPUs fed. They share concrete use cases such as Wells Fargo’s fraud detection texts and internal IT chatbots (via Lightspeed) and investment forecasting built on OpenShift AI.

The discussion then dives into security and platform engineering themes driving scale: post-quantum cryptography efforts across the stack; agent and agentic AI risks; and why Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers – and a new Envoy-based MCP gateway with elicitation and guardrails – should be the first line of defense, not just the agent. On modernization, they detail OpenShift virtualization (KubeVirt) for VM-to-container journeys (including migrations on the order of 40–50k VMs) and networking parity for VMs with Gateway API and user-defined networks. For cost and performance, they explore Kubernetes primitives such as LeaderWorkerSet, JobSet and “Kueue with a K,” citing IBM’s Vela supercomputer boosts toward ~90% utilization, plus DRA for resource claims. Looking ahead, they outline 2026 focus areas: AI and agentic AI in production, defense-in-depth for AI systems and data sovereignty pressures (e.g., DORA) – all reinforcing Kubernetes as the foundation for large-scale AI and cloud-native operations.

Jimmy Alvarez Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager | Red Hat

Shane Utt Senior Principal Software Engineer | Red Hat

Brian Monroe, NVIDIA & Venkat Ramakrishnan, Pure Storage

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 segment, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Venkat Ramakrishnan, vice president & general manager of Portworx by Pure Storage, and Brian Monroe, senior software engineer at NVIDIA, to unpack how a container-first strategy is powering NVIDIA’s R&D – from chip design to firmware and internal apps – across on-prem and cloud Kubernetes. Monroe details why his platform team chose Portworx to wrangle DAS-backed, commodity storage at scale and deliver true self-service to application teams. He explains how namespace-scoped, multi-tenant storage lets diverse groups share clusters without stepping on each other’s data, and how Portworx replication enables zero-downtime maintenance by shifting workloads as nodes are upgraded. The discussion spans workload diversity (batch and long-running), observability and metrics as resilience pillars, and the practicalities of scaling by adding nodes and storage to meet surging developer demand.

Ramakrishnan connects these hands-on lessons to broader industry needs for elasticity and uptime, noting that the core KPIs of scale and resiliency look similar whether you’re enabling thousands of developers or safeguarding payment flows. He also shares Portworx’s expansion into Kubernetes-based virtualization, highlighting the newly announced Kube datastores aimed at delivering VM-style datastore capabilities and end-to-end data management for VMs and containers. Monroe looks ahead to expanding Kubernetes environments into additional geographies, standing up more mission-critical stateful services (including multi-node Redis spanning eight nodes), and increasing flexibility with a recently POC’d Pure array with Cloud Drives storage. It’s a grounded view of platform engineering in service of AI and high-throughput R&D – prioritizing self-service, standardization and operational agility.

Venkat Ramakrishnan President and COO | NeuBird AI

Brian Monroe Senior Software Engineer | NVIDIA

Brian Cook, DTCC

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America segment, Brian Cook from DTCC joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to unpack how a zero-touch, GitOps-driven approach is accelerating secure Kubernetes adoption at the heart of global securities processing. Cook describes DTCC’s evolution – from a 50-year market infrastructure to a Kubernetes platform built on declarative configs (Helm, Kustomize) and fleet management – where manual changes are prohibited outside labs and config drift is automatically reverted within minutes. He details a structured enablement model across platform engineering, service integration and a dedicated Kubernetes governance/security team, enabling self-service with deployment instructions pre-completed and validated through third-party testing.

The conversation explores “permanent chaos” practices to harden resilience, practical use of admission controllers, and policy-as-code guardrails such as default egress policies the app teams must explicitly define. Cook explains how partnering daily with risk management boosts approval velocity, reframes CVE noise into actionable risk prioritization, and introduces competitive “risk scoring” and recognition for app teams. He also outlines a path to zero trust, including digital signing and automated certificate rotation – showing how platform engineering can raise velocity while improving governance. Framed within theCUBE’s broader KubeCon coverage, the discussion highlights real-world tactics for scaling Kubernetes securely and sustainably in highly regulated environments.

Brian Cook Director Kubernetes Platform | DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation)

Kevin Cochrane, Vultr & Aleks Shargorodskiy, AMD

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson speak with Kevin Cochrane from Vultr and Aleks Shargorodskiy from AMD about how their partnership is changing the economics of cloud and AI. Cochrane explains how Vultr and AMD co-engineered the new VX1 data center CPU offering, delivering 82% better performance per dollar and a 33% lower price than leading alternatives, helping customers refresh CPU infrastructure while funding new GPU investments. Shargorodskiy details how Vultr’s global footprint, combined with AMD Instinct GPUs (including the MI300X, MI325X and MI355X) and the open-source ROCm stack, makes it easier for customers to move from CUDA, scale AI workloads and tap into integrated CPU–GPU architectures.

The discussion also highlights how Vultr is supporting strict data residency and sovereign cloud requirements with in-region control planes that avoid external dependencies. Cochrane and Shargorodskiy point to life sciences and healthcare as clear examples, where AMD’s high-bandwidth memory allows large genomics and drug discovery models to run on a single GPU while keeping sensitive patient data in-country. Looking ahead to 2026, they predict growth in AI inference, decentralized scale-out architectures and federated approaches to regulated data, and tease further Vultr–AMD announcements coming at Super Compute.

Kevin Cochrane CMO | Vultr

Aleks Shargorodskiy Strategic Partnerships | AMD

Roman Zhukov & Anjali Telang, Red Hat

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson sits down with Red Hat’s Anjali Telang and Roman Zhukov to unpack what zero trust really means in the AI era. They explain how organizations can reuse existing Kubernetes security investments and zero-trust principles for agentic AI workloads, and why confidential computing and digital sovereignty matter as hybrid cloud and AI infrastructures span regions and jurisdictions.

They also explore how open source communities and new regulations such as the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act are reshaping software supply chain security and AI governance. Telang and Zhukov connect data provenance, the evolution from SBOMs to AI BOMs, and secure-by-design patterns using tools like OAuth, OIDC and SPIFFE/SPIRE to building trusted agentic AI and MCP-based systems. Looking ahead to KubeCon 2026, they share their hopes for clearer AI standards, stronger collaboration across foundations and broader, safer AI adoption in production.

Roman Zhukov Principal Security Community Architect, Open Source Program Office | Red Hat

Anjali Telang Senior Principal Product Manager, OpenShift Security and Identity | Red Hat

Kelsey Hightower & Bobby Allen, Google & Eric Hanselman, S&P Global Market Intelligence

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.

Eric Hanselman Chief Analyst | S&P Global Market Intelligence

Bobby Allen Cloud Therapist | Google Cloud

Kelsey Hightower, Akshay Ram & Eddie Villalba, Google

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson sits down with Google’s Akshay Ram, Kelsey Hightower and Eddie Villalba to explore how GKE is evolving to handle modern AI inference workloads. They break down GKE’s inference-focused innovations, from the Inference Gateway and GKE Inference Quickstart to new Kubernetes inference API primitives and CRDs that better handle unpredictable LLM request patterns, day-zero performance tuning and accelerator-aware load balancing. The discussion also touches on Google’s work with open-source communities such as Ray and vLLM, and the push toward more hardware-agnostic model serving across GPUs and TPUs.

The conversation goes deeper into Kubernetes as an extensible workload API and “infrastructure framework,” where CRDs turn real-world practices like inference into reusable APIs instead of one-off engineering efforts. Ram, Hightower and Villalba share practical advice for teams just getting started with Kubernetes and AI, emphasizing core principles such as understanding resource types and contracts, leaning on community support and GKE quickstarts, and recognizing the late-mover advantage of inheriting a decade of hard-won patterns. Looking ahead to 2026, they imagine a world where inference is “just another microservice,” customers remix Google’s building blocks in unexpected ways, and advanced optimizations from research labs and large AI builders flow quickly down to startups, enterprises and regulated industries at their own scale.

Akshay Ram Group Product Manager | Google

Jago Macleod & Gari Singh, Google & Kate Holerhoff, RedMonk

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America segment, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson sits down with Jago Macleod and Gari Singh from Google and analyst Kate Holterhoff from RedMonk for a fast-paced look at how GKE is scaling to meet AI demand. Singh explains how Google doubled a reference cluster from 65,000 to 130,000 nodes in a year for massive AI training jobs that can require 130,000 GPUs, and what it really takes for the control plane to schedule, start and communicate across clusters of that size. Macleod details how Google moved internal control-plane state from etcd to Spanner for massive scale, and how new Kubernetes capabilities like Dynamic Resource Allocation, in-place pod resizing, Vertical Pod Autoscaling and improved cluster autoscaling are helping customers run AI on Kubernetes and manage Kubernetes with AI.

The conversation also explores how hardware limits and efficiency are reshaping cloud-native design, from power and cooling innovations seen at Supercomputing to squeezing more capacity into every data center. Holterhoff shares how Kubernetes, AI conformance efforts and projects like OpenTelemetry (OTel) are coming together to support AI agents and complex workflows with strong community backing and observability. Looking ahead, Macleod points to a future of millions of accelerators on Kubernetes clusters and better “graceful degradation” as systems hit scale ceilings, while Singh envisions true platform agents that can auto-size and reshape pods so developers simply deploy and let the platform optimize.

Kate Holerhoff Senior Industry Analyst | RedMonk

theCUBE Insights Day 1 with Ned Bellavance, Ned in the Cloud & Joep Piscaer, TLA Tech

In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America Insights segment from Atlanta, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay wrap up day one with analysts Ned Bellavance and Joep Piscaer, unpacking how AI is reshaping the Kubernetes conversation. They highlight why inference is becoming the real AI battleground, how Kubernetes is emerging as the common layer for running those workloads, and why observability and security are now core pillars of the emerging AI conformance spec – including the need to monitor prompts and responses, not just CPU and latency.

The group also explores the operational reality behind the hype: the return of hardware discussions such as 400G networking, questions about what comes after Kubernetes, and whether WebAssembly and serverless will get a second act. They dig into identity and security challenges for agentic-style systems, the importance of human-in-the-loop oversight, and the growing pressure on ops teams to keep complex, distributed AI infrastructure running reliably – all while everyone waits for more real-world use cases that prove AI’s value beyond the slideware.

Ned Bellavance Independent Consultant & Technical Educator | Ned in the Cloud