2026 Will Be the Year of Agentic Workloads in Production on Amazon EKS
AWS’s approach to Elastic Kubernetes Service has evolved significantly since its 2018 launch. According to Mike Stefanik, Senior Manager of Product Management for EKS and ECR, today’s users increasingly represent the late majority—teams that want Kubernetes without managing every component themselves. In a conversation onThe New Stack Makers, Stefanik described how AI workloads are reshaping Kubernetes operations and why AWS open-sourced an MCP server for EKS. Early feedback showed that meaningful, task-oriented tool names—not simple API mirrors—made MCP servers more effective for LLMs, prompting AWS to design tools focused on troubleshooting, runbooks, and full application workflows. AWS also introduced a hosted knowledge base built from years of support cases to power more capable agents.While “agentic AI” gets plenty of buzz, most customers still rely on human-in-the-loop workflows. Stefanik expects that to shift, predicting 2026 as the year agentic workloads move into production. For experimentation, he recommends the open-source Strands SDK. Internally, he has already seen major productivity gains from BI agents that automate complex data analysis tasks.Learn more from The New Stack about Amazon Web Services’ approach to Elastic Kubernetes ServiceHow Amazon EKS Auto Mode Simplifies Kubernetes Cluster Management (Part 1)A Deep Dive Into Amazon EKS Auto (Part 2)Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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From Cloud Native to AI Native: Where Are We Going?
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2025 in Atlanta, the panel of experts - Kate Goldenring of Fermyon Technologies, Idit Levine of Solo.io, Shaun O'Meara of Mirantis, Sean O'Dell of Dynatrace and James Harmison of Red Hat - explored whether the cloud native era has evolved into an AI native era — and what that shift means for infrastructure, security and development practices. Jonathan Bryce of the CNCF argued that true AI-native systems depend on robust inference layers, which have been overshadowed by the hype around chatbots and agents. As organizations push AI to the edge and demand faster, more personalized experiences, Fermyon’s Kate Goldenring highlighted WebAssembly as a way to bundle and securely deploy models directly to GPU-equipped hardware, reducing latency while adding sandboxed security.Dynatrace’s Sean O’Dell noted that AI dramatically increases observability needs: integrating LLM-based intelligence adds value but also expands the challenge of filtering massive data streams to understand user behavior. Meanwhile, Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara emphasized a return to deeper infrastructure awareness. Unlike abstracted cloud native workloads, AI workloads running on GPUs require careful attention to hardware performance, orchestration, and energy constraints. Managing power-hungry data centers efficiently, he argued, will be a defining challenge of the AI native era.Learn more from The New Stack about evolving cloud native ecosystem to an AI native eraCloud Native and AI: Why Open Source Needs Standards Like MCPA Decade of Cloud Native: From CNCF, to the Pandemic, to AICrossing the AI Chasm: Lessons From the Early Days of CloudJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' Predictions for 2026
AWS re:Invent has long featured CTO Werner Vogels’ closing keynote, but this year he signaled it may be his last, emphasizing it’s time for “younger voices” at Amazon. After 21 years with the company, Vogels reflected on arriving as an academic and being stunned by Amazon’s technical scale—an energy that still drives him today. He released his annual predictions ahead of re:Invent, with this year’s five themes focused heavily on AI and broader societal impacts.Vogels highlights technology’s growing role in addressing loneliness, noting how devices like Alexa can offer comfort to those who feel isolated. He foresees a “Renaissance developer,” where engineers must pair deep expertise with broad business and creative awareness. He warns quantum-safe encryption is becoming urgent as data harvested today may be decrypted within five years. Military innovations, he notes, continue to influence civilian tech, for better and worse. Finally, he argues personalized learning can preserve children’s curiosity and better support teachers, which he views as essential for future education.Learn more from The New Stack about evolving role of technology systems from past to future: Werner Vogels’ 6 Lessons for Keeping Systems Simple50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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How Can We Solve Observability's Data Capture and Spending Problem?
DevOps practitioners — whether developers, operators, SREs or business stakeholders — increasingly rely on telemetry to guide decisions, yet face growing complexity, siloed teams and rising observability costs. In a conversation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, IBM’s Jacob Yackenovich emphasized the importance of collecting high-granularity, full-capture data to avoid missing critical performance signals across hybrid application stacks that blend legacy and cloud-native components. He argued that observability must evolve to serve both technical and nontechnical users, enabling teams to focus on issues based on real business impact rather than subjective judgment.AI’s rapid integration into applications introduces new observability challenges. Yackenovich described two patterns: add-on AI services, such as chatbots, whose failures don’t disrupt core workflows, and blocking-style AI components embedded in essential processes like fraud detection, where errors directly affect application function.Rising cloud and ingestion costs further complicate telemetry strategies. Yackenovich cautioned against limiting visibility for budget reasons, advocating instead for predictable, fixed-price observability models that let organizations innovate without financial uncertainty.Learn more from The New Stack about the latest in observability: Introduction to ObservabilityObservability 2.0? Or Just Logs All Over Again?Building an Observability Culture: Getting Everyone OnboardJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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How Kubernetes Became the New Linux
Major banks once built their own Linux kernels because no distributions existed, but today commercial distros — and Kubernetes — are universal. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, AWS’s Jesse Butler noted that Kubernetes has reached the same maturity Linux once did: organizations no longer build bespoke control planes but rely on shared standards. That shift influences how AWS contributes to open source, emphasizing community-wide solutions rather than AWS-specific products.Butler highlighted two AWS EKS projects donated to Kubernetes SIGs: KRO and Karpenter. KRO addresses the proliferation of custom controllers that emerged once CRDs made everything representable as Kubernetes resources. By generating CRDs and microcontrollers from simple YAML schemas, KRO transforms “glue code” into an automated service within Kubernetes itself. Karpenter tackles the limits of traditional autoscaling by delivering just-in-time, cost-optimized node provisioning with a flexible, intuitive API. Both projects embody AWS’s evolving philosophy: building features that serve the entire Kubernetes ecosystem as it matures into a true enterprise standard.Learn more from The New Stack about the latest in Kube Resource Orchestrator and Karpenter: Migrating From Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter v0.32How Amazon EKS Auto Mode Simplifies Kubernetes Cluster Management (Part 1) Kubernetes Gets a New Resource Orchestrator in the Form of KroJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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