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Cloud-Native Infrastructure in the Age of AI: Open Control and Orchestration

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by Alan Shimel

At KubeCon Europe 2025, Alan Shimel sits down with CTO Shaun O’Meara and CEO Alex Freedland to explore where cloud-native infrastructure is headed now that AI workloads are moving from pilot projects to day-to-day operations.

Freedland reaches back to the OpenStack years to make his case. Back then, open governance let competitors share a common platform while keeping their own value on top. He sees the same need today. AI inference jobs appear across data centers, public clouds and compact edge boxes, yet GPUs are limited and data-sovereignty rules keep information close to home. A task might start in Frankfurt, shift to an on-prem cluster in Dublin, then finish at a roadside 5G node. Something neutral has to connect those dots, and Kubernetes, he argues, is still the most portable choice.

O’Meara agrees but stresses that orchestration alone is only half the solution. Teams also need a unified control plane that cuts down tool sprawl and enforces policy while jobs are running. He pictures a future filled with thousands of short-lived “ephemeral agents” that spin up for one task and disappear minutes later. Without a shared layer to cache models, route work to free GPUs and apply guardrails, cost and risk escalate quickly.

Their takeaway is practical: the next breakthrough in AI won’t be a flashier model but dependable, open-source plumbing that lets existing models run where they need to without the usual operational headache. In other words, reliable infrastructure, not hype, will decide who wins the coming wave of AI-driven applications.

Alan Shimel

Alan Shimel is founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, a Futurum company, and a member of Futurum's executive leadership team. A technology entrepreneur, media executive and industry commentator, Shimel has spent more than three decades building businesses, communities and media platforms serving enterprise technology professionals, including co-founding StillSecure, a network security company, and the DevOps Institute, a DevOps certification and training body. At Techstrong, he leads a portfolio of media brands including DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Techstrong AI, Techstrong IT, Digital CxO, Platform Engineering, Techstrong Semi and Techstrong TV, along with a growing portfolio of events, educational programs and digital communities. With more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, Shimel is a familiar voice in the space and was an early advocate of the DevOps movement, helping bring DevOps practices into mainstream enterprise technology. His work today spans cybersecurity, DevOps, cloud-native technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and digital transformation, and he hosts popular programs including Techstrong Gang, Shimmy Says and Still Cyber, After All These Years. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics from St. John's University and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School.

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