The CNCF is graduating projects faster than ever. AI agents are helping with the due diligence.

The CNCF is graduating projects faster than ever. AI agents are helping with the due diligence. Back in 2018, a scrappy startup called OpenAI used Kubernetes to balance compute loads across its own data centers and AWS and Azure capacity. Years before the release of ChatGPT and the start of the current artificial intelligence boom, AI companies were training the future with the help of open-source technology. Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which stewards Kubernetes and other software tools, tells The New Stack that Kubernetes and other open-source tools are key to “enabling super flexible environments that can adapt [to] unprecedented demand for AI services” and the “crazy investment” we’re seeing in compute capacity today. Imagine a world where AI labs were forced to use a single compute provider, be it their own racks or one particular hyperscaled partner. How much slower would AI development be? Bryce says on the latest episode of The New Stack podcast that the “heritage” of open-source software lets modern companies scale workloads across heterogeneous compute without issue. We benefit from that daily as users. The open-source software-AI connection is stronger than a single tool, however. Bryce sees a positive feedback loop between AI and open source, arguing that OpenAI and its peers “couldn’t go buy something off the shelf in 2018 because they were doing training runs and building systems that nobody else had ever done at scale that nobody else had ever achieved,” forcing them to turn to the tools that were available, which were often open-source. The good news is that those same companies have contributed back to the open technologies that helped them grow, allowing “financial services institutions and manufacturing companies” to benefit “as they do their own AI infrastructure rollouts.” Even more, the CNCF has accepted and moved more products through its graduation process “faster than ever before in the last 18 months, in part because we have actually like created agents to help with the due diligence at the different stages,” Bryce says. Not all CNCF projects are as AI-pilled as their peers, but clearly we’re seeing an acceleration in tooling development as AI helps open-source developers ship more code. That difference in perspective is just one reason why the CNCF is counting down to its upcoming KubeCon event in Salt Lake City this November. Bryce thinks it’s “more important than ever” to get the community together to “determine the future of open source.” Why? Because agents are unlocking faster development and easier experimentation; because software now needs to handle AI queries at agent speed, not human pace; because non-deterministic agents need guardrails. And finally, because companies need to share how they are approaching multiple compute providers and multiple hardware architectures at the same time. Fill in your current headache here. The pace of change in software has never been faster. Thankfully, the open-source world is accelerating to meet the moment. Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s OpenAI will have access to the tools it needs, sans enterprise contract or provider lock-in, so that we can keep inventing the future.