IT Ops Query

Microsoft's Brendan Burns on the future of AI infrastructure

Microsoft corporate vice president and Kubernetes project co-founder Brendan Burns envisions a long-term transition in the industry from declarative cloud-native infrastructure to intent-based infrastructure, facilitated by AI. In the short term, the impact of AI on enterprise infrastructure will be strongest in two major areas, according to Burns: reducing toil through automation and improving data summarization with natural language-based infrastructure exploration.  As enterprises adjust to these changes, Burns emphasized that IT leaders should get hands-on, firsthand experience with AI automation tools.
Featuring: Brendan Burns, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
The KAITO open source project and Kubernetes evolution for AI
AI governance and control
What needs to change about companies' mindsets to best use AI
and more!
References:
Cloud infrastructure suffers AI growing pains
Microsoft Foundry ties in with Agent 365
Kubernetes AI progress in 2025 and the road ahead
SREs map uncharted territory with LLMOps
 
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Ex-Googler joins Crusoe Cloud, neocloud of Stargate fame

Erwan Menard spent six years at Google, where he most recently worked as director of product management for Google's Cloud AI services. Six months ago, he left to join Crusoe Cloud as senior vice president of product management. Crusoe Cloud, which offers everything from hosted cloud services to renewable power sources, is best known for operating the Stargate 1.2 gigawatt data center campus in Abilene, Texas. In this interview, Menard discusses the advantages of designing cloud data centers from the ground up to support AI workloads, and how the industry can meet exploding demand for data center resources, including power, as technology evolves.
Featuring: Erwan Menard, senior vice president of product management, Crusoe Cloud
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
Challenges and opportunities in AI cloud services
Technical differences in neocloud and public cloud networks
Gaining enterprises' trust in neoclouds
Keeping AI data centers sustainable
and more!
References:
Cloud infrastructure suffers AI growing pains
GenAI drives $119B cloud revenue in Q4
AI will heavily influence cloud-related decisions in 2026
Upstart cloud provider Railway turns heads with speed
 
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

IBM Watsonx Orchestrate and the state of AI agent platforms

Suzanne Livingston is vice president at IBM, overseeing product management for the watsonx Orchestrate AI agent platform. She says enterprises must strike between AI governance and trying to force every workload into one platform – or to be agentic at all. Going forward, managing AI agents will require new kinds of human-to-AI and human-to-human collaboration, according to Livingston, that the industry is just learning about.
Featuring: Suzanne Livingston, Vice President, IBM watsonx Orchestrate
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
Watsonx Orchestrate support for third-party AI agents
Unsolved AI security problems
How IBM customers are approaching AI governance
AI's influence on the future of work
and more!
References:
AI security worries stall enterprise production deployments
DevSecOps AI agents add platform context, woo enterprises
AI Agent Frameworks: A Guide to Evaluating Agentic Platforms
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Kelsey Hightower's advice for platform engineers as AI looms

Renowned public speaker, industry commentator, technologist and open source ambassador Kelsey Hightower describes himself as an AI skeptic, but warns that platform engineers should take the threat of AI to their jobs seriously. In this episode, he explains the skills IT operations leaders must emphasize as they prepare for the question: "What value do you bring over the machines?"
Featuring: Kelsey Hightower, technologist, speaker and open source ambassador
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
AI's "Bridge building problem"
Why AI is a surface-level technology
A coming salary correction for some IT pros
"Training your replacement" vs understanding systems
and more!
References:
DevSecOps AI agents add platform context, woo enterprises
Cloud-native platform engineering in the enterprise
Kubernetes AI progress in 2025 and the road ahead
GitHub Universe: Large IT orgs share AI automation gains
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Last year in AWS with Corey Quinn

Last year in AWS with Corey Quinn
To paraphrase David Letterman, this next guest needs no introduction, at least for many people in the cloud computing world: Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills "by making them smaller and less horrifying," according to his website bio. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts and curates the weekly newsletter "Last Week in AWS." In this episode, he shares his thoughts on the biggest and most overlooked AWS stories in 2025 and his outlook for 2026.
Featuring: Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
The ways AWS "got its mojo back" in 2025
Ongoing security issues with AWS CodeBuild
Amazon Bedrock vs "overconfident and also wrong bots" in customer service
Why IT buyers should beware the "AI tool"
and more!
References:
Critical flaw in AWS Console risked compromise of build environment
AWS AI IDE, AgentCore throw down gauntlets for Microsoft
AWS CloudOps hones multi-cloud support for AI, resilience
What Amazon Q prompt injection reveals about AI security
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Tales from the trenches of software supply chain security

Brett Smith, distinguished software developer at AI and data management software and services company SAS, has spent nine of his 13 years with the company focused on software supply chain security, managing DevSecOps and compliance for a 3,000-developer organization. He shares the good, the bad and the ugly of the journey to date, and his outlook for the future.
Featuring: Brett Smith, distinguished software developer, SAS
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
Focusing on software artifacts to secure the supply chain
Getting developer buy-in for cybersecurity
The role of Executive Order 14028 and the road ahead in compliance
AI and "security amnesia"
and more!
References:
Black Hat 2025: Navigating AI and supply chain security
Software supply chain security tools take on toil for users
Software supply chain security AI agents take action
IT pros revise pipelines for software supply chain security
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

AI data management and governance take center stage in 2026

You might recognize Rob Strechay from his appearances on TheCube livestreaming videos during industry conferences, but he's worn many hats in the industry over the years. In this wide-ranging discussion, he looks back at how AI data management evolved in 2025, and predicts that AI "governance, security and data quality are going to be all the rage in 2026."
Featuring: Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at TheCube Research
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) project
AI data management, data gravity and the persistence of data silos
AI security, governance and sovereign AI
AI agents and the future of business workflows
and more!
References:
New consortium to aid AI by standardizing semantic modeling
MCP OAuth update adds security for personalized AI
Nutanix sovereign cloud hits Broadcom with multi-cloud hook
2026 will be the year data becomes truly intelligent
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Behind the scenes with AIOps in Salesforce Hyperforce

As it rolled out AI and AIOps, Salesforce shunned the cloud repatriation route and instead expanded its public cloud presence with Hyperforce. Paul Constantinides, an engineering leader at Salesforce for more than 21 years, currently leads engineering for Hyperforce. In this episode, he details the evolution of the Salesforce internal platform over the years, what was behind the decision to launch Hyperforce, his team's extensive use of AIOps and his "NoOps" goals in the age of AI agents.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: IT Ops Query will be on a holiday break the next two weeks, returning Jan. 8 with all-new episodes.
Featuring: Paul Constantinides, executive vice president of engineering, Salesforce
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
Trust as a core value in infrastructure management at scale
How cloud-native principles improve resilience for AI applications
How internally developed AIOps tools perform automate incident remediation and response
The role for human engineers in a NoOps future
and more!
References:
What Salesforce’s AI agents can do for nonprofits
A+E Global Media boosts AIOps with deterministic AI
GenAI tools set to exceed past waves of AI automation
Salesforce workflow automation tools, Hyperforce debut
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

'Back to the Future' with self-hosted bare metal

Rob Hirschfeld is the CEO and co-founder of RackN, founded in 2014, focused on "addressing the messy challenge of operating at scale in physical data centers," according to his LinkedIn profile. Hirschfeld has had a front-row seat to the last decade of conversations in enterprise IT ops about bare-metal server operations and cloud repatriation, topics that remain hot as some enterprises look to move AI inference workloads on-premises.
Featuring: Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and co-founder of RackN
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
The recent history of cloud repatriation
The VMware factor in enterprise bare metal decisions
How generative AI workloads change the dynamics of self-hosted infrastructure for enterprises
Why going back to self-hosted infrastructure in 2025 doesn't mean going back to 2005 IT management practices
and more!
References:
AWS AI Factories target hybrid cloud AI infrastructure | TechTarget
Top 9 bare-metal cloud providers of 2025
New VMware private AI infrastructure rethinks Tanzu, again
Cloud repatriation vs. multi-cloud: IT seeks cost relief
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

JFrog ML CTO on enterprise AI software supply chain security

Yuval Fernbach has more than a decade of hands-on experience in the realm of data and machine learning, and served as the co-founder and CTO of Qwak from 2020 until it was acquired by JFrog in 2024. Fernbach is now vice president and CTO of JFrog ML, a subset of the JFrog software supply chain management toolset focused on AI and machine learning operations, or MLOps. In this interview, he discusses the unique challenges generative AI poses in software supply chain security, and what enterprise developers and platform engineers need to know about this new frontier in technology.
Featuring: Yuval Fernbach, vice president and CTO of JFrog ML
In today’s episode, we’ll cover…
Increased risks and governance issues due to generative AI's widespread use among software engineers
JFrog's platform extensions for managing AI models and Shadow AI detection
The importance of maturing AI adoption practices
JFrog Fly, an agentic artifact repository designed for small teams
and more!
References:
JFrog integrates with Hugging Face, Nvidia; intros JFrog ML
JFrog extends DevSecOps playbook to AI governance
JFrog connects key software supply chain management dots
JFrog buy bolsters MLOps combo with DevSecOps
To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.
To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.