Cloudnative

From Ideas to Impact: Cloud Native AI and TOC Highlights Post-KubeCon EU 2025

When we previewed the CNCF Cloud Native AI Working Group’s efforts ahead of KubeCon EU 2025, the tone was of curiosity and anticipation. Some still viewed AI as an outlier in the cloud-native world. But if KubeCon EU proved anything, AI has now fully arrived—and the community is building it in a cloud native way.

This year’s event didn’t just validate the momentum around AI; it showcased a CNCF community that’s actively rethinking its foundations—from how Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) work to how the community serves end users to how projects grow and graduate. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) had a visible and influential role throughout the week, laying down a clear marker: the next wave of cloud native isn’t just about orchestration—it’s about intelligence, usability, and sustainable growth.

Over the past six months, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Cloud Native AI (CNAI) Working Group has been at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with cloud-native technologies. This is a moment to discuss the working group’s initiatives and opportunities for contributors and enthusiasts as we prepare for KubeCon Europe 2025 in London.

The group has been making strides in galvanizing the community around the needs of AI/ML workloads on top of cloud native environments. A significant deliverable was the publication of the “Cloud Native AI” whitepaper in March 2024.

This same blog entry is here. Thanks to the cncf folks who helped me put this together.

I’ve attended many conferences before, but I was happy to get the diversity scholarship to attend CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 in Berlin as there is always so much more to learn. It was my first time attending an event organized by the Linux Foundation, and I hope to attend more in the future. I loved all the insights and advances that I obtained through all of the highlighted Cloud Native projects including Kubernetes, gRPC, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Linkerd, Fluentd and OpenDNS from the variety of industry leaders. The keynotes were quite memorable as well, including the Kubernetes 1.6 updates by Aparna Sinha (Google), Federation from Kelsey Hightower (Google), Kubernetes Security Updates from Clayton Coleman (Red Hat), Helm from Michelle Noorali (Deis), Scaling Kubernetes from Joe Beda (Heptio) and Quay from Brandon Phillips (CoreOS).

Over the last couple of years Docker has seen incredible growth across the tech industry. Its use ties together with deployment of Microservices in most Cloud based companies. Docker is easy to use and its in constant development. In the last month I decided to venture and try something different that has been around even before Docker but in a more primitive form. You see containers have been around before Docker for a long time and even before that with the introduction of chroot in 1979. Containers were first introduced in Solaris in 2005 with the introduction of Solaris Containers, described as ‘chroot’ on steroids. Then later in 2008 with adoption of the Containers name by LXC. (what Docker was based on initially) and also the inclusion of user namespaces in the Linux Kernel 3.8.