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.