Kubernetes Podcast from Google

Niki Manoledaki is a Staff Platform Engineer at Grafana Labs, A CNCF Ambassador and Green Software Foundation Champion, and a core maintainer of Project Kepler. We explore the recent rewrite of Project Kepler and the challenges of measuring sustainability in the era of AI.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
- web: kubernetespodcast.com
- mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
- twitter: @kubernetespod
- bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com
News of the week
Confidential Containers becomes a CNCF Incubating Project

KEP-5972 Dynamic Pod Mutation: Optimistic Execution & Hierarchical Resource Delegation

RedHat - Introducing asago: Open source AI safety and governance orchestration

Asago on GitHub

Asago website

KubeCon NA 2026 Schedule

CNCF Blog: Welcome CoHDI to the CNCF: Evolving Kubernetes into composable disaggregated infrastructures

Links from the interview
Project Kepler on GitHub
CNCF Blog: Kepler, re-architected: Improved power accuracy and a community call to action!

Green Software Foundation

"Building Green Software" by Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, Sara Bergman

Grafana Labs Blog: How Grafana Labs switched to Karpenter to reduce costs and complexities in Amazon EKS

GreenIO New York Conference

AI Energy Score Initiative on Hugging Face

Dr Sasha Luccioni's:  Power hungry processing: Watts driving the cost of AI deployment?

In this episode, Kat Cosgrove (SIG Docs Technical Lead, SIG Release Subproject Lead, and Steering Committee member) and Natali Vlatko (SIG Docs Co-Chair, Steering Committee member for the TODO Group, and Open Source Architect at Cisco) join hosts Kaslin Fields and Abdel Sghiouar to discuss the newly published Kubernetes AI usage policy. We dive into the legal and administrative reasoning behind the policy—including why AI tools cannot legally sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or co-author PRs—and explore how maintainers manage the influx of "AI slop" PRs, spam comments, and restricted AI note-taker bots in community meetings. The discussion highlights the balance between human accountability and AI as an enhancer, while sharing actionable advice on how new contributors can sustainably get involved with SIG Docs, issue wrangling, and the Kubernetes Release Team.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com

mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com

twitter: @kubernetespod

bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com

News of the week
Apple Native Container Tool for macOS 1.0: Apple has shipped version 1.0 of its native container tool for macOS. Built in Swift specifically for Apple Silicon, it departs from traditional shared-VM setups like Docker Desktop by isolating every single Linux container inside its own dedicated micro-VM using the native macOS Virtualization framework. Read more on Cloud Native Now.

Google OpenRL: Google launched OpenRL, a new open-source project designed to streamline the training and reinforcement learning loops of large language models. The tool brings declarative, Kubernetes-style resource orchestration concepts to the messy process of AI model fine-tuning. Read more on Cloud Native Now.

CNCF Welcomes New Members: At KubeCon CloudNativeCon India, the CNCF announced they added 14 new members, end Users, and non-profit organizations, highlighting the continued growth of the Cloud Native Ecosystem. One of the new members is Loveable, who was a recent guest on the show. We highly recommend you go listen to Episode 268 about the Agent Sandbox. Read the full announcement on PR Newswire.

Is a Pod the Right Deployment Unit for an AI Agent?: Lin Sun from Solo published a community post on the CNCF blog questioning whether the classic Kubernetes Pod primitive is still the best abstraction for hosting autonomous, long-running AI agents and introducing Agent-substrate, a project attempting to bring a solution to the table. Read more on the CNCF Blog.

Links from the interview
Kubernetes AI Usage Policy – Read the community's official guidelines and rules for AI-assisted contributions.

TODO Group Steering Committee – A Linux Foundation project bringing OSPO professionals and enthusiasts together.

Contributor License Agreement (CLA) – Standard agreement required for all human contributors, which AI agents cannot legally sign.

Kubernetes SIG Docs – Get involved with the documentation community.

SIG Docs Style Guide – Learn the style guidelines for contributing to Kubernetes docs.

Kubernetes SIG Release – Details on how to get involved with the release cycle.

Links from the post-interview chat
Linus Torvalds on AI LinkedIn Post – Torvalds' clarification on using AI as a helper tool rather than writing kernel C++ code.

Devoxx– A popular developer conference in Europe

Prowbot GitHub Repo – Kubernetes' main CI/CD bot handling PR automation.

In this episode we speak to Jonathan Grahl. 
Jonathan is the Team Lead of Infrastructure at Lovable where he oversees the platform stack the company runs on. We talked about Kubernetes, Sandboxes and Chocolate.
 
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
- web: kubernetespodcast.com
- mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
- twitter: @kubernetespod
- bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com
 
News of the week
OpenTelemetry is a CNCF Graduated Project
CNCF TAG Elections
KubeCon India
Kubernetes Community Days global events
Links from the interview
Lovable
Cilium
Etcd
Cloudflare Sandbox
Agent Sandbox (Kubernetes)
OpenClaw
Claude
OpenAI
Bun toolkit for Javascript
gVisor
Firecracker
Kata Containers
Vitess

Ryota Sawada is software engineer at Numtide and the release lead of Kubernetes 1.36 code name Haru. He has over a decade of experience mainly in the finance industry including working on Cloud Native technologies, and outside of Cloud Native, he's been tinkering with Emacs and Nix.
 
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
- web: kubernetespodcast.com
- mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
- twitter: @kubernetespod
- bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com
 
News of the week
Etcd version 3.7.0 is out

Merge Forward Community

Truepositive

Links from the interview
Kubernetes 1.35 codename Haru

Release theme and logo

Logo designer

User Namespaces

Workload API

Workload Aware Scheduling (WAS)

DRA features graduating to Stable

GKE 10 years and SIG Networking, With Antonio Ojea

Guest is Lucy Sweet, a Staff Software engineer at Uber and the lead for the Kubernetes Node Lifecycle Working Group. Imagine trying to move millions of compute cores and thousands of microservices to a brand new platform. All without dropping a single user request, ride, or delivery. Sounds like an absolute logistical nightmare, right? Well, today we are sitting down with someone who actually lived to tell the tale Lucy. In this episode, we are diving deep into Uber's monumental infrastructure journey: moving away from their in-house system to Kubernetes. We'll be unpacking the reality of running at this scale, why it's always DNS and why building things for fun is worth it.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
- web: kubernetespodcast.com
- mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
- twitter: @kubernetespod
- bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com
 
News of the week
Broadcom announced donating Velero to the CNCF Sandbox Level

KubeCon && CloudNativeCon Amsterdam 2026 Transparency report

Call for Proposals for KubeCon && CloudNativeCon North America 2026 closes May 31

OpenChoreo v1.0 CNCF Sandbox

Links from the interview
Lucy on Linkedin

Lucy's website

[Article] Migrating Uber's Compute Platform to Kubernetes

[Lucy Video] Migrating 2 million CPU cores to Kubernetes

Up: Portable Microservices Ready for the Cloud

Peloton: Uber's Unified Resource Scheduler for Diverse Cluster Workloads

Odin: Uber's Stateful Platform

Uber Batch platform

Apache Mesos

Hyrum's Law

GKE Blue-Green nodepools

Node Lifecycle Working Group

Scaling Infrastructure Management with Grail

kubegpt.org

Osquery

Uber Careers