In the opening episode of 2026, we mark a major milestone—a decade to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)—with none other than the CNCF’s CTO and co-founder, Chris Aniszczyk. Chris joins host Dotan Horovits on a fascinating fireside chat, looking back at the CNCF’s journey from a bold experiment into a central pillar of modern infrastructure. They discuss the current state of cloud-native, across Kubernetes and an ecosystem of over 200 projects, and share their grounded predictions for 2026 and into the second decade.
Beyond his role at the CNCF, Chris Aniszczyk serves as Executive Director of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), and CTO, Cloud & Infrastructure, at The Linux Foundation, the parent organization of the CNCF, OCI, OpenInfra and more. At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts.
You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/479e6bbf793c/
Show Notes:
00:00 - intro
01:51 - 10th anniversary to the CNCF
06:18 - the expanding scope of cloud native and Kubernetes
14:58 - the community expansion around the world
20:49 - KubeCon Europe
29:30 - consolidation of observability and security
34:00 - intersection of CNCF, FinOps and AI
37:35 - AI-generated code contribution for open source
43:46 - announcing the Agentic AI Foundation and MCP donation
53:00 - outro
Resources:
Observability for AI workloads: https://medium.com/p/b8972ba1b6baCNCF Ambassador’s
Reflections on 10 Years of CNCF: https://medium.com/p/a796646db552
Agentic AI Foundation formation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation
Socials:
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
Dotan Horovits
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Twitter: @horovits
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits
Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon
BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social
Chris Aniszczyk
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Twitter: @cra
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caniszczyk/
Mastodon: @cra@macaw.social
OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.
