Agent Sandbox and Lovable, with Jonathan Grahl

**Kaslin Fields** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I'm your host, Kaslin Fields.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (0:05)
And I am Abdel Sghiouar.
In this episode, we speak to Jonathan Grahl. Jonathan is a team lead of infrastructure at Lovable, where he oversees the platform stack the company runs on. In this episode, we talked about Kubernetes, Sandboxes and Chocolate.

**Kaslin Fields** (0:30)
But first, let's get to the news.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (0:34)
OpenTelemetry is a CNCF-graduated project, cementing its status as the de facto standard for observability. The project reached technical maturity with massive adoption. The JavaScript and Python APIs both recently surpassed 1.3 billion downloads.
OpenTelemetry is seen an increase in interest as the standard layer for observing performance, reliability and trustworthiness, specifically for AI workloads. Congratulations to the OpenTelemetry team.

**Kaslin Fields** (1:00)
The CNCF Technical Advisory Group elections are open.
With three former tag leads, Brand Keller, Mario Falant and Mauricio Salatino, stepping up into the 2026 Technical Oversight Committee. This opens up new positions within the advisory groups. Nominations are open for Tag Infrastructure, Operations Resiliency, DevExperience, Workloads Foundation and Security, and votes will start soon. Check the link in the description for details and dates.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (1:32)
In events news, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon India is happening in Mumbai on June 18-19. KCDs in Czech and Slovak, New York and Kuala Lumpur are happening on June 4, 10 and 27 respectively.

**Kaslin Fields** (1:46)
And that's the news.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (1:50)
Our guest on the show today is Jonathan Grahl.
Jonathan is the Team Lead of Infrastructure at Lovable, where he oversees the platform stack the company runs on. We will be talking Kubernetes, Sandboxes and Chocolate. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

**Jonathan Grahl** (2:02)
Thank you so much. So nice to be here.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (2:04)
Awesome. So I think everybody knows who Lovable is, but just in case people don't know who is Lovable, what do you guys do?

**Jonathan Grahl** (2:12)
Yeah. So Lovable is a platform that kind of aims to be your co-founder if you're making like a SaaS product or a tech-based product. So we are, well, I guess it's called like Vibe Coding, no man's glad share. So we help you build applications, even though you don't know technology at all. So we aim to help the 99% who are not technical to achieve their dreams basically.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (2:33)
Awesome. So Lovable is clearly one of the biggest players today and have been for a very long time one of the biggest players in the Vibe Coding space, which means that you folks have seen actually a very rapid growth, right? Your platform have been growing very fast and you run primarily on Kubernetes. You do also run on other platform. We're going to talk about that. Have you seen any scaling challenges? Because we all know Kubernetes is not easy to scale.

**Jonathan Grahl** (2:54)
Yeah. I think all of them, as expected.
This is why it's very interesting and very timely to talk about Sandboxes overall, or I guess overall, infra, as you can imagine, Lovable has gone like crazy. I can't actually remember how big we were in the summer, but right now we're building like several hundred thousand new projects per day on Lovable. Wow. So it's pretty crazy. And we were not that many when I joined in August and now we're significantly bigger. So in terms of scaling problems, I think we've hit every type of bug and scaling problem in all our providers that we're kind of at the frontier here.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (3:32)
Yeah. So can you talk specifically about some scaling challenges you've seen? Obviously, I think we all know that scaling envelope that Kubernetes has, which is, you know, this like multi-dimensional scaling problem that if you pull Kubernetes in one way, you stretch it too much.
Can you talk about some very specifics?

**Jonathan Grahl** (3:48)
Yes. So how Kubernetes works, you're absolutely right. Depending on what you're scaling, and there's so many different scaling vectors, things will start breaking, or you need to optimize for different things. So for example, a big one that we wrote about lately on our blog is Cilium, or like the Datablane V2, breaking due to, you know, we had a problem for like a couple of weeks where we would just drop packets sometimes during load. Very uncontrollably. And it was due to us, you know, enabling and disabling inter-node encryption in Datablane, or in Cilium. Which meant that MTU or packet size was different in different places.
And this probably wouldn't have happened if we didn't do it under load. So this is a place where Cilium has been maybe one of the things that are the most problematic in terms of getting, you know, in our case, our scaling kind of vector is actually pod churn, or pod creation rate more than, you know, how many pods we run. So our pod creation rate can be, you know, a few hundreds per second in certain times.