By Ryan Stevens
Publication Date: 2026-11-13 07:42:00
Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for distributed training and inference, but what happens to the compute bill when it runs AI agents that spend most of their time waiting?
When an agent’s container or virtual machine stays provisioned, customers pay for the wait as well as the work. To help customers control those costs and make agent workloads more predictable, Google LLC has donated three projects to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, according to Allan Naim (pictured, left), director of product management, AI infrastructure, at Google Cloud. For Kubernetes itself, the new challenge is freeing up compute between bursts of activity while letting each agent pick up where it left off.
“Act 2 is a few years back; Kubernetes became the de facto for inference and training,” Naim said. “What’s really interesting right now is we’re embarking on this Act 3 … where the typical patterns are very, very different from how Kubernetes was designed.”
Naim and Gari…
