The State of Cloud Native AI and What’s Still Evolving

There is no agreed upon definition of what cloud native AI means yet, but if you're trying to figure out where Kubernetes AI standards are really headed, check out this episode with someone who's worked on the CNCF's first attempt to define cloud native AI. 

William Morgan talks with Ron Petty (RXM, CNCF founding contributor, and member of the CNCF's TCG AI) about what's actually settled in cloud native AI and what isn't. They cover the CNCF's shift from working groups to technical community groups (TCGs), Petty's own framing of cloud native AI as a two-way street between building models and using AI to run cloud native systems, and the 15-criteria self-reported conformance program (mostly GPU management) that gets you an "AI certified" stamp. 

TAKEAWAYS 

✓ Why Ron Petty defines cloud native AI as a two-way street: building models on cloud native infrastructure, and using AI to run cloud native systems 

✓ What the CNCF's self-reported AI conformance program actually checks, including GPU management and having an AI router on your cluster 

✓ Why certificate management and rotation is still unsolved, and how that connects to why Linkerd defaults to mutual TLS 

✓ What's actually wrong with Model Context Protocol's design, according to a proxy engineer's read on it 

✓ Why long-running AI agents don't need fundamentally different guardrails than short-running ones 

✓ How K8sGPT uses existing Kubernetes checks plus an LLM to help junior engineers diagnose cluster issues faster

Read the blog post at: www.buoyant.io/ai-kubernetes-episode/the-state-of-cloud-native-ai-and-whats-still-evolving