Puja Abbassi

Remembering Kris Nóva YouTube video by Justin Garrison

The impact @krisnova.net had on the open source and cloud native communities is still going strong

Attending any conference in this space is a constant reminder

I still miss her
youtu.be/xnzS9D0oPWs?...

Happy birthday Kelsey. On to any more gifts to come

CloudNative.Now - February 2026 Welcome to the February edition of CloudNative.Now - a monthly newsletter that covers all that has been happening in the cloud native world

This months newsletter is now out! 🎉

✨ February 2026 ✨

https://cloudnative.now/2026-february/

Announcing Flux 2.8 GA We are thrilled to announce the release of Flux v2.8.0! Here you will find highlights of new features and improvements in this release.

Flux v2.8 is out! This release marks the General Availability of Helm v4 features such as server-side apply and enhanced health checking.

❤️ Big thanks to the Helm maintainers for their work on Helm v4 and for collaborating with us to ensure a smooth integration with Flux!

fluxcd.io/blog/2026/02...

Kuberoke Spring Party Amsterdam That Cloud Native conference is coming to beautiful Amsterdam and to celebrate the occasion, we are hosting a Karaoke party on Tuesday March 24, 9pm - 1am at Escape Club on Rembrandtplein.

Registrations for Kuberoke are now open! 🎉

Join us March 24th for the hottest party of the year!🎤✨

Tickets will be required for entry so be sure not to waste

🕘 Doors open at 9 pm and the party goes on until 1 am 🎶

kuberoke.love/events/sprin...

I worked on a few fairly prominent efforts in open source (Istio, OpenAPI), but I think of all of them, it’s gRPC that I think has the coolest story. Pull up a chair and set for a spell (any inaccuracies in what follows are 100% my fault for having a bad memory!).

Our team wants to make getting started with MCP Apps as easy as possible, so we put every resource imaginable in our GitHub repo.

All here
⮡ github.com/modelcontext...

If you're building with MCP Apps, I would love to hear your feedback - how can we make this a smoother process?

And having attended at least one of your live demo keynotes, I gotta say, that confidence shines through and it is very clear you know what you're talking about.

Screenshot from conf.party homepage showing the header name and logo with "Subscribe to ical" link below

😎 Just added an ical link to @conf.party

You can now subscribe to calendar with either all events or a calendar for conference specific events.

Cloud Native Rejekts Europe 2026 Sat, March 21, 2026

🚨 This is not a drill!!! 🚨

The tickets for Cloud Native Rejekts are available NOW! 😮

We can't wait to see you all in Amsterdam! 🇳🇱

pretix.eu/rejekts/reje...

wer sagt es unseren kompetenzlern bevor die den vertrag unterschreiben?

I’ll be speaking in the Lighthouse Theatre (T6) tomorrow morning!

It's the weirdest thing, right? I did learn though that some notaries are way better than others as they also explain in plain speak and make it much more digestable or interesting with humor. Still crazy paying someone thousands for reading out loud 😅

Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots Google AI Introduces PaperBanana: An Agentic Framework that Automates Publication Ready Methodology Diagrams and Statistical Plots

A model is optimized for visualizing things for research. It actually stays true to the data for example by mixing traditional visualization using code with vision generating (also sorry for the spammy website) www.marktechpost.com/2026/02/07/g... #AI #vision

Even I find the flood of Claude Code posts in the AI social media space deafening. They’re crowding out other conversations.

Rejekts is continuing 💜

Introducing Lexi Nadolski, Marcus Noble and Laura Santamaria as the Steering Committee & moving to community-led events.

Get involved: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
CFP ends Jan 17: sessionize.com/cloud-native...

Read full announcement👇
🔗 github.com/RejektsConfe...

Building with Purpose: Joe Beda on Systems and Self // Alexa's Input (AI) Podcast YouTube video by Alexa's Input (AI)

Sat down with Alexa Griffith for her podcast, Alexa's Input (AI). We talked about a whole bunch of things related to both Kubernetes and careers and such in general.

Check it out!

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1kpy...
YouTube: youtu.be/Im5ghJX2z0k?...

Thanks for having me, Alexa!

Chris Short Résumé | Chris Short I'm looking for a new role! With 30 years in the industry, I'm excited to start a new chapter. I believe every ending creates space for something more rewarding. I love taking intricate technical concepts and making them click for people. Whether through content, community work, or strategic enablement, my best days are when I help practitioners understand powerful tools and drive adoption. What I Bring My career bridges deep technical capability with clear communication: Content That Drives Adoption: I've created 700+ hours of video content and maintain newsletters reaching 6,300+ subscribers (DevOps'ish, EKS.news). I've given countless talks that translate complexity into clarity, driving revenue and reducing support load. Community Impact: As a former CNCF Ambassador and current Kubernetes Contributor Comms co-lead, I led communications for the K8s registry migration, achieving zero downtime globally. I've onboarded dozens of contributors and helped shape how we discuss cloud native tech. Shipping Big Things: I led the AWS re:Invent 2023 Kubernetes track with 50+ speakers and 30+ sessions, improving CSAT scores. I drove Valkey's developer engagement strategy—it's now the de facto Redis fork worldwide. I organized and hosted GitOpsCon EU 2021 with 300+ attendees, making it a top 2 KubeCon Day 0 event. Earlier in my career, I led a $1M AWS cloud migration with measurable savings. Technical Depth: I bring 30 years across IT ops, DevOps, the Kubernetes/CNCF ecosystem, open source tooling (Linux/Ansible), multi-cloud environments, and container technologies. Bonus: I'm now AI-enabled. What I'm Looking For Roles where technical experience meets storytelling. Three must-haves: customer-facing, cloud-native, and storytelling-heavy. Developer Advocate, Technical Marketing Manager, and Product Marketing Manager roles fit perfectly. Solutions Architect positions could work if they involve customer-facing technical communication and enablement. I'm especially interested in companies building cloud native tools or Kubernetes-based platforms—that's my playground. The Remote Piece I need remote work as a disabled veteran managing nerve/spine damage, PTSD, and anxiety. My Detroit care team keeps me going. I'm near a major Delta hub and have done same-day international trips when needed. Remote doesn't mean unavailable—I'm committed to being responsive and engaged. Let's Connect After three decades, I know my value: I make complex tech accessible, build communities around products, and drive adoption through authentic technical storytelling. I'm available now for full-time roles; contract work could also fit. If you're building something great and need someone who translates technical depth into business impact, let's talk. Contact: https://lnkd.in/g-CbGNdT Resume: https://lnkd.in/gzdjdQxB Here's to embracing new chapters and exciting challenges ahead.

I was laid off last week. I'm excited to start a new chapter where I can put my knowledge and dedication to work. I believe every chapter closes to make room for something more rewarding. I'm keen to discover the next opportunity. Learn more: www.linkedin.com/pos... #OpenToWork

Kuberoke is coming home to Amsterdam, bigger and better than ever! 🎤 ✨

Help us make it happen! Tell your friends, coworkers and bosses (especially those with marketing budget!)

Open for sponsorship now 💙

Context Widows or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

Gotta love the wordplay here, this one is about #AI and #science and how it’s the incentives we set even before AI that encourage “slop”not an inherent result of #LLM usage - Context Widows artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi...

MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces Today we’re introducing the proposal for the MCP Apps Extension (SEP-1865) to standardize support for interactive user interfaces in the Model Context Protocol. This extension addresses one of the…

As people are misunderstanding this, it’s about having a standard for interactive and/or visual feedback to the user of the client calling the #MCP, not a direct interface to the MCP - MCP Apps: Extending servers with interactive user interfaces blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2025-1... #AI

Building Clean, Maintainable vLLM Modifications Using the Plugin System [!NOTE] Originally posted on this Medium article.

Having seen way too many vLLM forks, this looks like a great way forward - Building Clean, Maintainable #vLLM Modifications Using the Plugin System blog.vllm.ai/2025/11/20/v... #AI #LLM

Code execution with MCP: building more efficient AI agents Learn how code execution with the Model Context Protocol enables agents to handle more tools while using fewer tokens, reducing context overhead by up to 98.7%.

Important topic to evaluate when building agents with #MCP calls, they have some good tips on how to reduce cost and even tighten security postures with code execution in #AI #agents www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] To provide educational and informative content on cloud native computing, which uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, ...

FYI: most of the #kubecon #cloudnativecon NA videos are up on youtube, should hopefully be all there by end of next week! www.youtube.com/@cncf/videos

Brainwash Your Agent: How We Keep The Memory Clean Nov 7, 2025

Brainwash Your Agent: How We Keep The Memory Clean www.camel-ai.org/blogs/brainw...

Deep Agents Using an LLM to call tools in a loop is the simplest form of an agent. This architecture, however, can yield agents that are “shallow” and fail to plan and act over longer, more complex tasks.…

LangChain on Deep #Agents blog.langchain.com/deep-agents/ #AI #LLM

Infrastructure for AI is finally getting a standard » Giant Swarm AI infrastructure just got simpler. Giant Swarm is officially CNCF-certified to run AI/ML workloads on Kubernetes.

AI infra just got a standard. CNCF launched the Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, and @puja.dev was part of the group that helped define it.

Giant Swarm is now one of the first certified platforms.

Streamline Complex AI Inference on Kubernetes with NVIDIA Grove | NVIDIA Technical Blog Over the past few years, AI inference has evolved from single-model, single-pod deployments into complex, multicomponent systems. A model deployment may now consist of several distinct components…

And best thing, it’s open source - Streamline Complex #AI Inference on #Kubernetes with #NVIDIA Grove | NVIDIA Technical Blog

Effective context engineering for AI agents Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

A bit older but still important to define #contextengineering and introduce some techniques for optimization - Effective context engineering for #AI agents www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

Introducing TFree-HAT 7B: Tokenizer-Free Models Achieving Top-Tier Multilingual Performance - Aleph Alpha We’re excited to share something fresh from our research lab. Just recently, we made public two new tokenizer-free models built on our Hierarchical Autoregressive Transformer (HAT) architecture:…

It’s really cool seeing this outperform models with tokenizers, especially in non-English use cases, recommend reading the research background - Introducing TFree-HAT 7B: Tokenizer-Free Models Achieving Top-Tier Multilingual Performance aleph-alpha.com/introducing-... #AI #LLM #Research