The New Stack Podcast

OnThe New Stack Agents, Gavriel Cohen discusses why he built NanoClaw, a minimalist alternative to OpenClaw, after discovering security and architectural flaws in the rapidly growing agentic framework. Cohen, co-founder of AI marketing agencyQwibit, had been running agents across operations, sales, and research usingClaude Code. When Clawdbot (laterOpenClaw) launched, it initially seemed ideal. But Cohen grew concerned after noticing questionable dependencies—including his own outdated GitHub package—excessive WhatsApp data storage, a massive AI-generated codebase nearing 400,000 lines, and a lack of OS-level isolation between agents. In response, he createdNanoClawwith radical minimalism: only a few hundred core lines, minimal dependencies, and containerized agents. Built around Claude Code “skills,” NanoClaw enables modular, build-time integrations while keeping the runtime small enough to audit easily. Cohen argues AI changes coding norms—favoring duplication over DRY, relaxing strict file limits, and treating code as disposable. His goal is simple, secure infrastructure that enterprises can fully understand and trust.   Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around personal AI agents Anthropic: You can still use your Claude accounts to run OpenClaw, NanoClaw and Co. It took a researcher fewer than 2 hours to hijack OpenClaw OpenClaw is being called a security “Dumpster fire,” but there is a way to stay safe Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

A few weeks after Dynatrace acquired DevCycle, Michael Beemer and Andrew Norris discussed on The New Stack Makers podcast how feature flagging is becoming a critical safeguard in the AI era. By integrating DevCycle’s feature flagging into the Dynatrace observability platform, the combined solution delivers a “360-degree view” of software performance at the feature level. This closes a key visibility gap, enabling teams to see exactly how individual features affect systems in production. As “agentic development” accelerates—where AI agents rapidly generate code—feature flags act as a safety net. They allow teams to test, control, and roll back AI-generated changes in live environments, keeping a human in the loop before full releases. This reduces risk while speeding enterprise adoption of AI tools. The discussion also highlighted support for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenFeature standard to avoid vendor lock-in. Ultimately, developers are evolving into “conductors,” orchestrating AI agents with feature flags as their baton.   Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around AI enterprise development:  Why You Can't Build AI Without Progressive Delivery  Beyond automation: Dynatrace unveils agentic AI that fixes problems on its own  Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.   

Dynatrace is at a pivotal point, expanding beyond traditional observability into a platform designed for autonomous operations and security powered by agentic AI. In an interview on *The New Stack Makers*, recorded at the Dynatrace Perform conference, Chief Technology Strategist Alois Reitbauer discussed his vision for AI-managed production environments. The conversation followed Dynatrace’s acquisition of DevCycle, a feature-management platform. Reitbauer highlighted feature flags—long used in software development—as a critical safety mechanism in the age of agentic AI. Rather than allowing AI agents to rewrite and deploy code, Dynatrace envisions them operating within guardrails by adjusting configuration settings through feature flags. This approach limits risk while enabling faster, automated decision-making. Customers, Reitbauer noted, are increasingly comfortable with AI handling defined tasks under constraints, but not with agents making sweeping, unsupervised changes. By combining AI with controlled configuration tools, Dynatrace aims to create a safer path toward truly autonomous operations. Learn more from The New Stack about the latest in progressive delivery: Why You Can’t Build AI Without Progressive Delivery Continuous Delivery: Gold Standard for Software Development Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Matan-Paul Shetrit, Director of Product Management at Writer, argues that people must take responsibility for how they use AI. If someone produces poor-quality output, he says, the blame lies with the user—not the tool. He believes many misunderstand AI’s role, confusing its ability to accelerate work with an abdication of accountability. Speaking on The New Stack Agents podcast, Shetrit emphasized that “we’re all becoming editors,” meaning professionals increasingly review and refine AI-generated content rather than create everything from scratch. However, ultimate responsibility remains human. If an AI-generated presentation contains errors, the presenter—not the AI—is accountable. Shetrit also discussed the evolving AI landscape, contrasting massive general-purpose models from companies like OpenAI and Google with smaller, specialized models. At Writer, the focus is on enabling enterprise-scale AI adoption by reducing costs, improving accuracy, and increasing speed. He argues that bespoke, narrowly focused models tailored to specific use cases are essential for delivering reliable, cost-effective AI solutions at scale. Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around enterprise development: Why Pure AI Coding Won’t Work for Enterprise Software How To Use Vibe Coding Safely in the Enterprise Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

AI coding assistants are boosting developer productivity, but most enterprises aren’t shipping software any faster. GitLab CEO Bill Staples says the reason is simple: coding was never the main bottleneck. After speaking with more than 60 customers, Staples found that developers spend only 10–20% of their time writing code. The remaining 80–90% is consumed by reviews, CI/CD pipelines, security scans, compliance checks, and deployment—areas that remain largely unautomated. Faster code generation only worsens downstream queues.GitLab’s response is its newly GA’ed Duo Agent Platform, designed to automate the full software development lifecycle. The platform introduces “agent flows,” multi-step orchestrations that can take work from issue creation through merge requests, testing, and validation. Staples argues that context is the key differentiator. Unlike standalone coding tools that only see local code, GitLab’s all-in-one platform gives agents access to issues, epics, pipeline history, security data, and more through a unified knowledge graph.Staples believes this platform approach, rather than fragmented point solutions, is what will finally unlock enterprise software delivery at scale. Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around GitLab and AI: GitLab Launches Its AI Agent Platform in Public BetaGitLab’s Field CTO Predicts: When DevSecOps Meets AIJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.

Sean O’Dell of Dynatrace argues that enterprises are unprepared for a major shift brought on by AI: the rise of the developer. Speaking at Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, O’Dell explains that AI-assisted and “vibe” coding are collapsing traditional boundaries in software development. Developers, once insulated from production by layers of operations and governance, are now regaining end-to-end ownership of the entire software lifecycle — from development and testing to deployment and security. This shift challenges long-standing enterprise structures built around separation of duties and risk mitigation. At the same time, the definition of “developer” is expanding. With AI lowering technical barriers, software creation is becoming more about creative intent than mastery of specialized tools, opening the door to nontraditional developers. Experimentation is also moving into production environments, a change that would have seemed reckless just 18 months ago. According to O’Dell, enterprises now understand AI well enough to experiment confidently, but many are not ready for the cultural, operational, and security implications of developers — broadly defined — taking full control again.Learn more from The New Stack about the latest around enterprise developers and AI: Retool’s New AI-Powered App Builder Lets Non-Developers Build Enterprise AppsSolving 3 Enterprise AI Problems Developers FaceEnterprise Platform Teams Are Stuck in Day 2 HellJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

In the era of agentic AI, attention has largely focused on data itself, while metadata has remained a neglected concern. Junping (JP) Du, founder and CEO of Datastrato, argues that this must change as AI fundamentally alters how data and metadata are consumed, governed, and understood. To address this gap, Datastrato created Apache Gravitino, an open source, high-performance, geo-distributed, federated metadata lake designed to act as a neutral control plane for metadata and governance across multi-modal, multi-engine AI workloads. Gravitino achieved major milestones in 2025, including graduation as an Apache Top Level Project, a stable 1.1.0 release, and membership in the new Agentic AI Foundation. Du describes Gravitino as a “catalog of catalogs” that unifies metadata across engines like Spark, Trino, Ray, and PyTorch, eliminating silos and inconsistencies. Built to support both structured and unstructured data, Gravitino enables secure, consistent, and AI-friendly data access across clouds and regions, helping enterprises manage governance, access control, and scalability in increasingly complex AI environments.Learn more from The New Stack about how the latest data and metadata are consumed, governed, and understood: Is Agentic Metadata the Next Infrastructure Layer?Why AI Loves Object StorageThe Real Bottleneck in Enterprise AI Isn’t the Model, It’s ContextJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Chris Aniszczyk, co-founder and CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), argues that AI agents resemble microservices at a surface level, though they differ in how they are scaled and managed. In an interview ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe, he emphasized that being “AI native” requires being cloud native by default. Cloud-native technologies such as containers, microservices, Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry provide the scalability, resilience, and observability needed to support AI systems at scale. Aniszczyk noted that major AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude already rely on Kubernetes and other CNCF projects.To address growing complexity in running generative and agentic AI workloads, the CNCF has launched efforts to extend its conformance programs to AI. New requirements—such as dynamic resource allocation for GPUs and TPUs and specialized networking for inference workloads—are being handled inconsistently across the industry. CNCF aims to establish a baseline of compatibility to ensure vendor neutrality. Aniszczyk also highlighted CNCF incubation projects like Metal³ for bare-metal Kubernetes and OpenYurt for managing edge-based Kubernetes deployments. Learn more from The New Stack about CNCF and what to expect in 2026:Why the CNCF’s New Executive Director Is Obsessed With InferenceCNCF Dragonfly Speeds Container, Model Sharing with P2PJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

API sprawl creates hidden security risks and missed revenue opportunities when organizations lose visibility into the APIs they build. According to IBM’s Neeraj Nargund, APIs power the core business processes enterprises want to scale, making automated discovery, observability, and governance essential—especially when thousands of APIs exist across teams and environments. Strong governance helps identify endpoints, remediate shadow APIs, and manage risk at scale. At the same time, enterprises increasingly want to monetize the data APIs generate, packaging insights into products and pricing and segmenting usage, a need amplified by the rise of AI.To address these challenges, Nargund highlights “smart APIs,” which are infused with AI to provide context awareness, event-driven behavior, and AI-assisted governance throughout the API lifecycle. These APIs help interpret and act on data, integrate with AI agents, and support real-time, streaming use cases.IBM’s latest API Connect release embeds AI across API management and is designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, offering centralized governance, observability, and control through a single hybrid control plane.Learn more from The New Stack about smart APIs: Redefining API Management for the AI-Driven Enterprise How To Accelerate Growth With AI-Powered Smart APIs Wrangle Account Sprawl With an AI Gateway Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

A CloudBees survey reveals that enterprise migration projects often fail to deliver promised modernization benefits. In 2024, 57% of enterprises spent over $1 million on migrations, with average overruns costing $315,000 per project. In The New Stack Makers podcast, CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur describes this pattern as “the migration mirage,” where organizations chase modernization through costly migrations that push value further into the future. Findings from the CloudBees 2025 DevOps Migration Index show leaders routinely underestimate the longevity and resilience of existing systems. Kapur notes that applications often outlast CIOs, yet new leadership repeatedly mandates wholesale replacement. The report argues modernization has been mistakenly equated with migration, which diverts resources from customer value to replatforming efforts. Beyond financial strain, migration erodes developer morale by forcing engineers to rework functioning systems instead of building new solutions. CloudBees advocates meeting developers where they are, setting flexible guardrails rather than enforcing rigid platforms. Kapur believes this approach, combined with emerging code assistance tools, could spark a new renaissance in software development by 2026.Learn more from The New Stack about enterprise modernization: Why AI Alone Fails at Large-Scale Code ModernizationHow AI Can Speed up Modernization of Your Legacy IT SystemsJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.  

IBM’s recent acquisitions of Red Hat, HashiCorp, and its planned purchase of Confluent reflect a deliberate strategy to build the infrastructure required for enterprise AI. According to IBM’s Sanil Nambiar, AI depends on consistent hybrid cloud runtimes (Red Hat), programmable and automated infrastructure (HashiCorp), and real-time, trustworthy data (Confluent). Without these foundations, AI cannot function effectively. Nambiar argues that modern, software-defined networks have become too complex for humans to manage alone, overwhelmed by fragmented data, escalating tool sophistication, and a widening skills gap that makes veteran “tribal knowledge” hard to transfer. Trust, he says, is the biggest barrier to AI adoption in networking, since errors can cause costly outages. To address this, IBM launched IBM Network Intelligence, a “network-native” AI solution that combines time-series foundation models with reasoning large language models. This architecture enables AI agents to detect subtle warning patterns, collapse incident response times, and deliver accurate, trustworthy insights for real-world network operations.Learn more from The New Stack about AI infrastructure and IBM’s approach:  AI in Network Observability: The Dawn of Network Intelligence How Agentic AI Is Redefining Campus and Branch Network Needs Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Ari Zilka, founder of MyDecisive.ai and former Hortonworks CPO, argues that most observability vendors now offer essentially identical, reactive dashboards that highlight problems only after systems are already broken. After speaking with all 23 observability vendors at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Zilka said these tools fail to meaningfully reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), a long-standing demand he heard repeatedly from thousands of CIOs during his time at New Relic.Zilka believes observability must shift from reactive monitoring to proactive operations, where systems automatically respond to telemetry in real time. MyDecisive.ai is his attempt to solve this, acting as a “bump in the wire” that intercepts telemetry and uses AI-driven logic to trigger actions like rolling back faulty releases.He also criticized the rising cost and complexity of OpenTelemetry adoption, noting that many companies now require large, specialized teams just to maintain OTel stacks. MyDecisive aims to turn OpenTelemetry into an enterprise-ready service that reduces human intervention and operational overhead.Learn more from The New Stack about OpenTelemetry:Observability Is Stuck in the Past. Your Users Aren't. Setting Up OpenTelemetry on the Frontend Because I Hate MyselfHow to Make OpenTelemetry Better in the BrowserJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke’s claim that AI-based development requires progressive delivery frames a conversation between analyst James Governor and The New Stack’s Alex Williams about why modern release practices matter more than ever. Governor argues that AI systems behave unpredictably in production: models can hallucinate, outputs vary between versions, and changes are often non-deterministic. Because of this uncertainty, teams must rely on progressive delivery techniques such as feature flags, canary releases, observability, measurement and rollback. These practices, originally developed to improve traditional software releases, now form the foundation for deploying AI safely. Concepts like evaluations, model versioning and controlled rollouts are direct extensions of established delivery disciplines. Beyond AI, Governor’s book “Progressive Delivery” challenges DevOps thinking itself. He notes that DevOps focuses on development and operations but often neglects the user feedback loop. Using a framework of four A’s — abundance, autonomy, alignment and automation — he argues that progressive delivery reconnects teams with real user outcomes. Ultimately, success isn’t just reliability metrics, but whether users are actually satisfied. Learn more from The New Stack about progressive delivery: Mastering Progressive Hydration for Enhanced Web Performance Continuous Delivery: Gold Standard for Software Development Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.  

Most enterprises today run workloads across multiple IT infrastructures rather than a single platform, creating significant operational challenges. According to Nutanix CTO Deepak Goel, organizations face three major hurdles: managing operational complexity amid a shortage of cloud-native skills, migrating legacy virtual machine (VM) workloads to microservices-based cloud-native platforms, and running VM-based workloads alongside containerized applications. Many engineers have deep infrastructure experience but lack Kubernetes expertise, making the transition especially difficult and increasing the learning curve for IT administrators. To address these issues, organizations are turning to platform engineering and internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity and provide standardized “golden paths” for deployment. Integrated development environments (IDEs) further reduce friction by embedding capabilities like observability and security. Nutanix contributes through its hyper converged platform, which unifies compute and storage while supporting both VMs and containers. At KubeCon North America, Nutanix announced version 2.0 of Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK), adding advanced data protection, fault-tolerant replication, and enhanced security through a partnership with Canonical to deliver a hardened operating system for Kubernetes environments.Learn more from The New Stack about operational complexity in cloud native environments:Q&A: Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami on the Cloud Native Enterprise Kubernetes Complexity Realigns Platform Engineering Strategy Platform Engineering on the Brink: Breakthrough or Bust? Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.

GPUs dominate today’s AI landscape, but Google argues they are not necessary for every workload. As AI adoption has grown, customers have increasingly demanded compute options that deliver high performance with lower cost and power consumption. Drawing on its long history of custom silicon, Google introduced Axion CPUs in 2024 to meet needs for massive scale, flexibility, and general-purpose computing alongside AI workloads. The Axion-based C4A instance is generally available, while the newer N4A virtual machines promise up to 2x price performance.In this episode, Andrei Gueletii, a technical solutions consultant for Google Cloud joined Gari Singh, a product manager for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Pranay Bakre, a principal solutions engineer at Arm for this episode, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, in Atlanta. Built on Arm Neoverse V2 cores, Axion processors emphasize energy efficiency and customization, including flexible machine shapes that let users tailor memory and CPU resources. These features are particularly valuable for platform engineering teams, which must optimize centralized infrastructure for cost, FinOps goals, and price performance as they scale.Importantly, many AI tasks—such as inference for smaller models or batch-oriented jobs—do not require GPUs. CPUs can be more efficient when GPU memory is underutilized or latency demands are low. By decoupling workloads and choosing the right compute for each task, organizations can significantly reduce AI compute costs.Learn more from The New Stack about the Axion-based C4A: Beyond Speed: Why Your Next App Must Be Multi-ArchitectureArm: See a Demo About Migrating a x86-Based App to ARM64Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Enterprises are racing to deploy AI services, but the teams responsible for running them in production are seeing familiar problems reemerge—most notably, silos between data scientists and operations teams, reminiscent of the old DevOps divide. In a discussion recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025, IBM’s Thanos Matzanas and Martin Fuentes argue that the challenge isn’t new technology but repeating organizational patterns. As data teams move from internal projects to revenue-critical, customer-facing applications, they face new pressures around reliability, observability, and accountability.The speakers stress that many existing observability and governance practices still apply. Standard metrics, KPIs, SLOs, access controls, and audit logs remain essential foundations, even as AI introduces non-determinism and a heavier reliance on human feedback to assess quality. Tools like OpenTelemetry provide common ground, but culture matters more than tooling.Both emphasize starting with business value and breaking down silos early by involving data teams in production discussions. Rather than replacing observability professionals, AI should augment human expertise, especially in critical systems where trust, safety, and compliance are paramount.Learn more from The New Stack about enabling AI with silos: Are Your AI Co-Pilots Trapping Data in Isolated Silos?Break the AI Gridlock at the Intersection of Velocity and TrustTaming AI Observability: Control Is the Key to SuccessJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Rob Whiteley, CEO of Coder, argues that the biggest winners in today’s AI boom resemble the “picks and shovels” sellers of the California Gold Rush: companies that provide tools enabling others to build with AI. Speaking onThe New Stack Makersat AWS re:Invent, Whiteley described the current AI moment as the fastest-moving shift he’s seen in 25 years of tech. Developers are rapidly adopting AI tools, while platform teams face pressure to approve them, as saying “no” is no longer viable. Whiteley warns of a widening gap between organizations that extract real value from AI and those that don’t, driven by skills shortages and insufficient investment in training. He sees parallels with the cloud-native transition and predicts the rise of “AI-native” companies. As agentic AI grows, developers increasingly act as managers overseeing many parallel AI agents, creating new challenges around governance, security, and state management. To address this, Coder introduced Mux, an open source coding agent multiplexer designed to help developers manage and evaluate large volumes of AI-generated code efficiently.Learn more from The New Stack about AI Parallelization The Production Generative AI Stack: Architecture and ComponentsEnable ParallelFrontend/Backend Development to Unlock VelocityJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Nvidia Distinguished Engineer Kevin Klues noted that low-level systems work is invisible when done well and highly visible when it fails — a dynamic that frames current Kubernetes innovations for AI. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, Klues and AWS product manager Jesse Butler discussed two emerging capabilities: dynamic resource allocation (DRA) and a new workload abstraction designed for sophisticated AI scheduling.DRA, now generally available in Kubernetes 1.34, fixes long-standing limitations in GPU requests. Instead of simply asking for a number of GPUs, users can specify types and configurations. Modeled after persistent volumes, DRA allows any specialized hardware to be exposed through standardized interfaces, enabling vendors to deliver custom device drivers cleanly. Butler called it one of the most elegant designs in Kubernetes.Yet complex AI workloads require more coordination. A forthcoming workload abstraction, debuting in Kubernetes 1.35, will let users define pod groups with strict scheduling and topology rules — ensuring multi-node jobs start fully or not at all. Klues emphasized that this abstraction will shape Kubernetes’ AI trajectory for the next decade and encouraged community involvement.Learn more from The New Stack about dynamic resource allocation: Kubernetes Primer: Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) for GPU WorkloadsKubernetes v1.34 Introduces Benefits but Also New Blind SpotsJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.  

At KubeCon North America 2025, GitLab’s Emilio Salvador outlined how developers are shifting from individual coders to leaders of hybrid human–AI teams. He envisions developers evolving into “cognitive architects,” responsible for breaking down large, complex problems and distributing work across both AI agents and humans. Complementing this is the emerging role of the “AI guardian,” reflecting growing skepticism around AI-generated code. Even as AI produces more code, humans remain accountable for reviewing quality, security, and compliance.Salvador also described GitLab’s “AI paradox”: developers may code faster with AI, but overall productivity stalls because testing, security, and compliance processes haven’t kept pace. To fix this, he argues organizations must apply AI across the entire development lifecycle, not just in coding. GitLab’s Duo Agent Platform aims to support that end-to-end transformation.Looking ahead, Salvador predicts the rise of a proactive “meta agent” that functions like a full team member. Still, he warns that enterprise adoption remains slow and advises organizations to start small, build skills, and scale gradually.Learn more from The New Stack about the evolving role of "cognitive architects":The Engineer in the AI Age: The Orchestrator and ArchitectThe New Role of Enterprise Architecture in the AI EraThe Architect’s Guide to Understanding Agentic AIJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Jonathan Bryce, the new CNCF executive director, argues that inference—not model training—will define the next decade of computing. Speaking at KubeCon North America 2025, he emphasized that while the industry obsesses over massive LLM training runs, the real opportunity lies in efficiently serving these models at scale. Cloud-native infrastructure, he says, is uniquely suited to this shift because inference requires real-time deployment, security, scaling, and observability—strengths of the CNCF ecosystem. Bryce believes Kubernetes is already central to modern inference stacks, with projects like Ray, KServe, and emerging GPU-oriented tooling enabling teams to deploy and operationalize models. To bring consistency to this fast-moving space, the CNCF launched a Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, ensuring environments support GPU workloads and Dynamic Resource Allocation. With AI agents poised to multiply inference demand by executing parallel, multi-step tasks, efficiency becomes essential. Bryce predicts that smaller, task-specific models and cloud-native routing optimizations will drive major performance gains. Ultimately, he sees CNCF technologies forming the foundation for what he calls “the biggest workload mankind will ever have.” Learn more from The New Stack about inference: Confronting AI’s Next Big Challenge: Inference Compute Deep Infra Is Building an AI Inference Cloud for Developers Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.