Cloud-Native Computing Is Poised To Explode (zdnet.com) 32
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At KubeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)'s leaders predicted an enormous surge in cloud-native computing, driven by the explosive growth of AI inference workloads. How much growth? They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months. [...] Where cloud-native computing and AI inference come together is when AI is no longer a separate track from cloud-native computing. Instead, AI workloads, particularly inference tasks, are fueling a new era where intelligent applications require scalable and reliable infrastructure. That era is unfolding because, said [CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce], "AI is moving from a few 'Training supercomputers' to widespread 'Enterprise Inference.' This is fundamentally a cloud-native problem. You, the platform engineers, are the ones who will build the open-source platforms that unlock enterprise AI."
"Cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it's really an incredible place we're in right now," said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk. The data backs up this opinion. For example, Google has reported that its internal inference jobs have processed 1.33 quadrillion tokens per month recently, up from 980 trillion just months before. [...] Aniszczyk added that cloud-native projects, especially Kubernetes, are adapting to serve inference workloads at scale: "Kubernetes is obviously one of the leading examples as of the last release the dynamic resource allocation feature enables GPU and TPU hardware abstraction in a Kubernetes context." To better meet the demand, the CNCF announced the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, which aims to make AI workloads as portable and reliable as traditional cloud-native applications.
"As AI moves into production, teams need a consistent infrastructure they can rely on," Aniszczyk stated during his keynote. "This initiative will create shared guardrails to ensure AI workloads behave predictably across environments. It builds on the same community-driven standards process we've used with Kubernetes to help bring consistency as AI adoption scales." What all this effort means for business is that AI inference spending on cloud-native infrastructure and services will reach into the hundreds of billions within the next 18 months. That investment is because CNCF leaders predict that enterprises will race to stand up reliable, cost-effective AI services.
"Cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it's really an incredible place we're in right now," said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk. The data backs up this opinion. For example, Google has reported that its internal inference jobs have processed 1.33 quadrillion tokens per month recently, up from 980 trillion just months before. [...] Aniszczyk added that cloud-native projects, especially Kubernetes, are adapting to serve inference workloads at scale: "Kubernetes is obviously one of the leading examples as of the last release the dynamic resource allocation feature enables GPU and TPU hardware abstraction in a Kubernetes context." To better meet the demand, the CNCF announced the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, which aims to make AI workloads as portable and reliable as traditional cloud-native applications.
"As AI moves into production, teams need a consistent infrastructure they can rely on," Aniszczyk stated during his keynote. "This initiative will create shared guardrails to ensure AI workloads behave predictably across environments. It builds on the same community-driven standards process we've used with Kubernetes to help bring consistency as AI adoption scales." What all this effort means for business is that AI inference spending on cloud-native infrastructure and services will reach into the hundreds of billions within the next 18 months. That investment is because CNCF leaders predict that enterprises will race to stand up reliable, cost-effective AI services.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months
Complete bullshit. All these companies are throwing around huge numbers, claiming that they are going to spend eleventy gazillion dollars. Do you really believe that companies are going to spend 10 times their total yearly revenue in just the next 2 years? Are you really that stupid? It's all bullshit. It's all just gaming the stock market. Make big announcement, stock go up.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of raising capital is convincing everyone that you need the money and have a good plan for it. We're probably better off if these companies don't actually buy even 10% of the things they are saying they will buy. The hype funding schemes are incredibly harmful to business long-term, but the short-term pay off is too attracted for them to ever stop doing it.
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The stock market remains high, so a recession isn't officially called?
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How are consumers benefiting from fake buys only to pay increased prices because of fake demand?
My financial bros tell me that anything that keeps the stock market on the up-tick is long-term good for everyone, since most pensions are now stock market roulette money for the big players. Frankly, I think those guys suck up way too much of their own hype to actually be rational about it, but that's the propaganda coming from high finance.
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In the long-term, consumers don't benefit. But the con is in the short-term gains and the benefit is to investors that get out in time, or otherwise have instruments that manage risk of a soon-to-be toxic asset.
Your average 401K or retirement fund manager isn't going to keep people's retirement safe, their focus is on the commission they earn for selling retirees extract things they probably don't need, like term life. Or doing almost nothing if they aren't using commission-based or hybrid compensation. I b
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They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in
make number go up
over the next 18 months. That era is unfolding because, said [CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce]
there's even more gullible suckers around than during the dot-com boom.
"I'll say! You just need to mention AI and the rubes will practically throw money at you"
said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk.
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They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months
Complete bullshit. All these companies are throwing around huge numbers, claiming that they are going to spend eleventy gazillion dollars. Do you really believe that companies are going to spend 10 times their total yearly revenue in just the next 2 years? Are you really that stupid? It's all bullshit. It's all just gaming the stock market. Make big announcement, stock go up.
Not only this, but also there are a lot of companies, big and small, just starting to wake up from the cloud compute coma that seemed to have infested everyone over the last decade and change and saying, "Maybe we shouldn't have on-prem AI be owned by someone else, sucking up all our data?" It's already started being a topic of conversation among my management team. And if we're chatting about it, guarantee that it's been a topic among faster moving companies for at least a few months, if not years.
What is a 'token'? (Score:3)
And why are being 'processed'?
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LLM's version of concepts or categories.
Re:What is a 'token'? (Score:4, Informative)
"Processing" "tokens" is fundamentally what an LLM does.
Simplified, It takes input text, tokenizes it (splits it up according to the same rules as the corpus), maps that to a huge sparse network of vectors that serve as a lossy represention the tokenized training corpus, and then plays "pick the next most likely token" to respond.
If you choose to pay money to one of the robot timeshares, you are effectively buying the right to feed it this many tokens and expect back to get back that many tokens per month.
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Looks just more AI scamming to me. "Poised to explode" = "we hope to pump before we dump".
Paint me skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
"Foo Foundation predicts there will be a Foo boom"
Re:Paint me skeptical (Score:4, Interesting)
Cloud-Native Computing Is Poised To Explode
If by "explode" you mean crash and burn, then yes I would agree.
Reject All Things AI (Score:3)
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Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
At my place we're currently migrating everything we can back to server-based architectures because trying to maintain a zillion of lambdas and other microservices costs us more in development time and money than it costs to run a proper monolithic server. Kubernetes on top and you're sorted.
Turns out having a stack that devs can run FULLY locally, gives them 10x bonus to development speed.
I mean, we're still in the cloud, just not cloud-native.
Re: Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can also run your own server on someone else's server.
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Somehow, we'll find something to charge you for.
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You can also run your own server on someone else's server.
"Yo, dawg..."
Re: Really? (Score:2)
Unfortunately you can't mock all AWS sergices locally, even with things like localstack. ...and don't even get me started about Java in lambdas...
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Broadly speaking, a lot of the 'cloud native' stuff are complex solutions to potentially complex problems that fit within the parameters that those approaches can handle.
If you don't have those complex problems, then it's a premature optimization that is painful. If your use case is not the sort of use case resembling the bread and butter of the applications that instigated these approaches, then it's all pain, no gain.
There was a team that maintained a project that was broadly panned for not being good en
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No... (Score:2)
You already had your turn in the late 2010s after big data and before AI. You don't get to come back to the hype line for seconds.
for safety... (Score:4, Funny)
put it behind cloudflare!
Society for Eating Crap Stuck To Your Shoe (Score:3)
Predicts eating crap stuck to your shoe is the hot new trend for 2026.
A distributed single point of failure (Score:2)
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Oh, look! A thinly designed marketing puff piece (Score:2)
Cloud computing = someone else's servers = somebody always looking over your shoulder.
It's the security state's wet dream.
Fancy way of saying Server Farms. (Score:3)
inference jobs have squandered 1.33 quadrillion tokens per month
They should give these numbers in MegaWatts, or perhaps EV miles for the new crowd.