The open AI-native stack on Kubernetes: From open models to distributed inference and agents

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Over the past decade, Kubernetes established itself as the standard for orchestrating microservices and containerized applications. Today, we're witnessing the next major architectural shift in distributed computing: AI workloads moving from isolated research prototypes into large-scale, multi-tenant production fleets. In this post, we'll walk through the open-source stack that powers this shift and show you the sample manifests that you can try on your own Kubernetes clusters. You can also join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 to see these projects in action through live demos and technical sessions.

For modern engineering teams, production AI is rapidly moving beyond generic calls to closed, black-box APIs. Organizations are realizing that their long-term competitive advantage lies in domain specialization. Platform engineers, ML researchers, and AI builders want the autonomy to run high-performing open-weight models (such as the Gemmafamily). They want to adapt them to proprietary enterprise datasets by...

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