CNCF used KubeCon NA 2025 to signal a major shift: open source technologies are now driving the future of AI-native cloud infrastructure.
Open source has become the de facto foundation for AI-native cloud infrastructure, a shift underscored at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2025 with CNCF’s launch of the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program. The new open standard aims to make AI workloads predictably deployable and interoperable across diverse infrastructures. This aligns with the industry-wide view that cloud-native and AI-native development are converging, powered by advances such as Dynamic Resource Allocation that optimise training and inference across GPUs, TPUs and mainframes.
“As developers adopt AI, cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it’s really an incredible place we’re in right now,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “How do we take all the capabilities Kubernetes provides like autoscaling, and apply that to AI training, and inference, and agents to take it even further?”
The open source AI wave intensified after the “DeepSeek Moment”, proving that community-built models can compete with proprietary offerings. This momentum, combined with rising complexity, has triggered a strong revival in platform engineering. “Developers are still the internal customers who need platforms as products,” said Daniel Bryant, Head of Marketing, Syntasso Ltd.
New open-source tooling is shaping this revival, including Formæ, a declarative IaC platform that abstracts infrastructure for both developers and operators. Infrastructure optimisation also took centre stage, with Calico’s AI assistant, Floxdev’s “uncontained” Nix-powered environments, and Golem’s WASM-driven agentic orchestration.
Security and governance remained critical, driven by a >16% rise in supply chain attacks. Cloudsmith, Kusari and AuthZed showcased open-source–rooted tools addressing dependency, vulnerability and authorisation challenges.
The ecosystem is moving further toward AI-driven observability with ControlTheory’s Gonzo, Komodor’s Klaudia and emerging “AI SRE” capabilities.
Despite rising complexity, the mood was clear: open source is now steering the future of AI-native cloud systems.
