Navigating AI Guidelines in Kubernetes, with Kat Cosgrove and Natali Vlatko

**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.

**Kaslin Fields** (0:17)
In this episode, we talk with Kat Cosgrove and Natali Vlatko.
Kat and Natali are both members of the Kubernetes Steering Committee and leads of SIGs, Release for Kat and Docs for Natali. The Kubernetes Steering Committee recently published a new policy on AI usage for Kubernetes contribution. We dive into that AI usage policy and explore the challenges and experiences AI has brought to Kubernetes maintainers. But first, let's get to the news.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (0:46)
Apple has shipped version 1 of its Native Container Tool for macOS. Built in Swift, specifically for Apple Silicon, it departs from traditional shared VM setups like Docker Desktop by isolating every single Linux container inside its own dedicated micro-VM using the native macOS virtualization framework.

**Kaslin Fields** (1:05)
Google launched OpenRL, a new open-source project designed to streamline the training and reinforcement learning loops of large language models. The tool brings declarative Kubernetes-style resource orchestration concepts to the messy process of AI model fine-tuning.

**Abdel Sghiouar** (1:20)
At KubeCon CloudNativeCon India, the CNCF announced they added 14 new members and users and non-profit organizations. This highlights the continued growth of the Cloud Native ecosystem.
One of the new members is Loveable, who was a recent guest on the show. We highly recommend you go listen to episode 268 about the agent sandbox.

**Kaslin Fields** (1:39)
Is a pod the right deployment unit for an AI agent? Lin Sun from Solo published a community post on the CNCF blog, questioning whether the classic Kubernetes pod primitive is still the best abstraction for hosting autonomous, long-running AI agents and introducing agent substrate, a project attempting to bring a solution to the table.
And that's the news.
Hello and welcome to the Kubernetes podcast from Google. I'm super excited today to be talking about AI in Kubernetes. And whenever I say this, people always think that I mean like running AI on Kubernetes or there's so many different angles that you can take for it. But today I want to talk about how AI is affecting the open-source community. So for contributors, how are they using AI? What is the community thinking about how AI is changing, how we do contribution, all that kind of stuff. And to join me to talk about that, I have Kat Cosgrove and Natali Vlatko.
Would you like to introduce yourselves? Let's go with Kat first.

**Kat Cosgrove** (2:41)
During the day, my actual job, I am the village sorcerer at Village Sequel. But in Kubernetes, I am a technical lead for SIG Docs. I own the Release Team subproject for SIG Release, and I'm a member of the Steering Committee.

**Kaslin Fields** (2:56)
Wonderful. And welcome to the show. And Natali.

**Natali Vlatko** (2:59)
Thanks for having me. In my day job, I run the Open Source Program Office or OSPO for short, at a little known company called Cisco, which is a lot of fun. But in Kubernetes specifically, I am one of the co-chairs of SIG Docs as well. And in terms of other open source fun, I'm also currently a Steering Committee member for the TODO Group, which is a project of the Linux Foundation that gets open source program office professionals and enthusiasts together to basically do good open source in the world.

**Kaslin Fields** (3:30)
I'm so glad that I asked you to introduce yourself because I didn't know anything about that. Now I do. I have not heard of the TODO Group.

**Natali Vlatko** (3:38)
We are happy to have you in the community. You don't have to be a member in order to join the Slack community that we have to ask questions or to use our resources. Happy to provide all of that later on.

**Kaslin Fields** (3:49)
We'll include those links in the show notes. If you would please send those over.

**Natali Vlatko** (3:53)
Definitely.

**Kaslin Fields** (3:55)
Both of you have had some experiences as very open-source involved folks with AI in open-source and particularly in Kubernetes, though if you have insights from other communities, I'd be interested in those as well.
But let's start off by diving right into it. There is actually a policy from Kubernetes about how AI is allowed to be used in the project. I think a lot of people probably don't know that. You should check out the policy. I will link it in the show notes. But with how fast everything is changing, all of the different tools that people are trying to use, and different ways that people are trying to use AI, I think it's really important to have some guidelines. We've also heard interesting news stories about how AI is affecting open-source. So let's start off by talking about what is in this relatively new, it came out a couple months ago, relatively new AI policy for Kubernetes. Kat, you published it, so do you want to kick us off by giving us a little summary?