KubeCon Atlanta 2025 & the AI-Native Shift

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta highlighted a pivotal shift towards AI-native operations in the cloud-native ecosystem during its 10th anniversary, with over 9,000 attendees. The event emphasized that AI workloads have moved from experimental to a focus on standardization and production-ready tooling, with a significant highlight being the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, which sets baseline requirements for AI workload execution. Key themes included the maturation of platform engineering into a standardized discipline with tools like Crossplane and Argo CD, and the transition from Ingress NGINX to the Gateway API for managing modern traffic routing. The conference also featured talks addressing technical advancements in Kubernetes, such as zero-downtime upgrades, mastering distributed AI model inference, and evolving platform engineering strategies. The broader message conveyed was that Kubernetes is maturing into an operating system for AI-native infrastructure, providing standardized tooling and patterns for managing intelligent systems at scale, and showcasing the community's alignment around practical solutions over hype.