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.
AI: From Experiments to Ecosystems
If 2023 was the year AI became a buzzword in infrastructure and 2024 was the year cloud natives started exploring it, then 2025 is shaping up to be the year real systems begin to emerge. KubeCon EU had many sessions that tackled the practical side of building AI-native infrastructure with Kubernetes and adjacent tools.
Talks like “Balancing Cost and Efficiency: Day 2 Optimization of Multicluster AI Infrastructure” and “Discover CNCF TAG Runtime: Advancing Cloud-Native Innovation from AI to Edge” deepened sophistication. These weren’t high-level overviews—they dealt with memory-aware scheduling, GPU fragmentation, inference optimization, and workload orchestration across clouds.
In a CNCF strategy session, there was a strong emphasis on the importance of reference architectures and real-world case studies to accelerate community contributions and drive adoption. The discussion also explored how AI is becoming both a key differentiator and a stress test for open source governance. One participant noted, “We’re seeing a convergence of innovation—but now we have to make it usable for everyone, not just cloud providers or hyperscalers.”
The Maintainer Summit: A Community in Sync
KubeCon EU started with the CNCF Maintainer Summit on March 31 at Excel London. Led in part by CNCF TOC, the summit began with a “Welcome to your TOC” keynote that helped demystify the TOC’s role and reinforced its commitment to community transparency.
But the real energy came from the roundtables.
One session focused on the TAG reboot initiative, which brought dozens of maintainers together to explore how CNCF’s technical advisory groups could evolve. The winning idea? A proposal for “Centralized Resource Management and Transparency”—a service catalogue model that abstracts project resource provisioning complexity. It’s a small idea with enormous potential, especially for smaller or newer projects struggling to scale consistently.
“It’s about reducing the operational tax,” one participant shared. “If we want more innovation, we must remove friction from the path to maturity.”
Developer Experience and Platform Engineering Take Center Stage
One unmistakable trend throughout KubeCon EU 2025 was the growing attention to platform engineering and developer experience (DevEx). As cloud-native tooling grows more powerful, it becomes more complex, and teams across industries are now investing in internal platforms to remove that complexity.
Several talks and panels dove deep into how platform engineering can serve as a force multiplier—especially in AI/ML contexts where the cost of experimentation is high and infrastructure sprawl is real. Case studies from large-scale users, including financial institutions and media companies, revealed a familiar pattern: empowering developers with better tooling and guardrails results in faster iteration, lower cognitive load, and more secure systems.
In a well-attended session, “Balancing Cost and Efficiency: Day 2 Optimization of Multicluster AI Infrastructure,” speakers discussed how teams integrate cost visibility into their internal developer platforms. The goal is to make every deployment of an AI workload observable and accountable. Several open-source tools showcased how organizations implement budget-aware schedulers, GPU-aware job runners, and intelligent autoscaling policies—all exposed through easy-to-use self-service interfaces.
Another standout session, “Stateful Superpowers,” demonstrated how developer-focused tooling can ease the operational burden of managing stateful workloads—long considered one of Kubernetes’ most complex challenges.
The week’s creative highlight was the storytelling-driven live demo, “Izzy Saves the Birthday.” Framed as a service mesh-powered adventure and showcased making concepts like observability, traffic shaping, and resilience engineering more engaging and accessible for platform teams. It served as a reminder that infrastructure doesn’t have to be dry and that the human experience remains central to how cloud-native tools are built and adopted.
The recurring theme was that DevEx isn’t fluff. Whether you’re enabling researchers training LLMs or developers deploying edge-native apps, the experience you create for internal teams shapes your velocity, cost, and resilience.
Keynotes that Told a Story
One of the most memorable aspects of KubeCon EU 2025 was the storytelling woven throughout the keynote sessions. Three big ideas repeatedly emerged during the event: bringing energy to our work, understanding our users, and true teamwork. These ideas show that we need technical chops and people skills to succeed.
Day 2 delved into actual user experiences. People talked about why we need open standards that everyone can access, ways to work together without the usual headaches, and processes with nothing hidden. A panel reflecting on a decade of the CNCF ecosystem offered a candid look at the journey and what’s needed to sustain momentum into the future.
Day 3 featured a standout session titled “221B Cloud Native Street,” which tied the event’s central themes—AI, multicluster management, cost optimization, and sustainability—into a cohesive, forward-looking narrative. One speaker said, “We can’t just build for builders anymore. We must build for the people running workloads at scale, across clouds, with limited budgets.”
TOC Sessions: From Quantum to Service Mesh
Beyond the keynotes, TOC members delivered deep-dive talks across a wide range of topics:
- Quantum-Ready Kubernetes
- Stateful Workloads at Scale
- Sidecar-less Service Mesh at The New York Times
- TAG Runtime’s AI to Edge Vision
The TOC Public meeting on the final day drew various community members. Attendees asked tough questions about the TAG reboot’s potential to slow down project progression—but TOC members clarified that the reboot’s purpose is to accelerate maturity, not gatekeep it. Focusing TAGs on actionable technical guidance and consistent evaluation criteria aims to set projects up for success in the next ten-plus years.
Themes That Will Shape the Next Year
KubeCon EU 2025 didn’t just highlight cool demos or announce new projects. It clarified where the CNCF is driving the ecosystem:
- AI is no longer adjacent. It’s a core use case driving change across orchestration, infrastructure provisioning, and security.
- Multicluster and cost optimization are now table stakes—not bonus features.
- Project maturity needs stronger scaffolding—standardization, reference materials, and aligned incentives.
- End users want a seat at the table—and the TOC is starting to make room.
The CNCF community is evolving and maturing. Thanks to the collaborative work of TOC members, maintainers, and contributors, the conversations at KubeCon EU weren’t just loud—they were focused, future-oriented, and deeply grounded in real needs.
The journey from edge to core, AI to observability, and sandbox to graduation is becoming more navigable daily.
And we’re just getting started.
Call to Action!
Whether you’re a seasoned contributor or just curious about getting started, now’s the perfect time to jump in. Join the conversation, bring your ideas, collaborate on new initiatives, and help shape the future of open source. The community is buzzing—be part of it, and join any of the following groups!
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