On-prem DBaaS in 2026: Platforms, standards, and gaps
For application teams, databases should feel like a solved problem. A team needs PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, or another data service, submits a request, receives credentials, and starts building. In practice, the experience is rarely that simple….
Evolving platform engineering for AI-native workloads
Platform Engineering 1.0 delivered real value. Golden paths accelerated deployment. Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) reduced cognitive load for developers. Self-service infrastructure gave developers back hours they had been spending filing tickets. Pipelines provided a standard vehicle to…
How data sovereignty is changing cloud native infrastructure design
The core issue isn’t where your server sits. It’s who can be compelled to hand over what’s on it. For years, cloud providers treated sovereignty as a geography problem. Pick a region. Choose a country. Keep…
Kepler, re-architected: Improved power accuracy and a community call to action!
Thank you to Laura Llinares, Mary Baldwin Hughes, Vimal Kumar, and Sunil Thaha for their significant contributions to this blog post and the Kepler project. Data centers accounted for 1.5% of global electricity demand in 2024,…
Securing CI/CD for an open source project, part 3: Credentials, verification, and what’s next
This is the third and final post in a series on how Cilium hardens its CI/CD pipeline. Part 1 covered access control and Part 2 covered dependency hardening. This post covers the last layer: keeping CI…
Telemetry that matters: Designing sustainable, high-impact observability pipelines
As system architectures grow increasingly complex, the cloud-native community faces a subtle but pressing challenge: we are drowning in our own telemetry data. It is easier than ever to instrument an application and collect signals, but…
In March, I gave a talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam. After the session, the same questions kept coming up on the CNCF Slack and in person: why build agentic AI on cloud…
From data residency to digital sovereignty: Architectural patterns for cloud native platforms
Over the past two years, digital sovereignty has evolved from a policy discussion into a practical platform engineering concern. The EU Data Act has been fully applicable since January 11, 2025. NIS-2 and DORA already shape…
Breaking the single datacenter assumption Modern AI architectures are built on the assumption of centralized, homogeneous data centers. In reality, infrastructure is messy. For most organizations, compute resources are fragmented across private clouds, research environments, and…
Benchmarking KubeVirt performance with virtbench
Organizations migrating VM estates from traditional hypervisors to KubeVirt often discover that many Kubernetes observability tools were originally designed around container workloads rather than VM-centric operational metrics. While KubeVirt schedules VMs as pods, the performance variables…