IT Ops Times article by Eric Newcomer
Ten years after standardizing Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced at KubeCon 2025 NA in Atlanta that they are working to standardize AI workloads on Kubernetes, with the goal of achieving broad industry adoption of the standard.
Announced on November 11 the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program creates open, community-defined standards for running AI workloads on Kubernetes. Kubernetes providers in the program certify their products for various types of AI workloads.
“It starts with a simple focus on the kind of things you really need to make AI workloads work well on Kubernetes,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Such as Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) across GPUs, TPUs, and all of the different types of AI hardware.”
CNCF membership is squarely in support, Anisczyck said. For example, “Google’s obviously interested in this because they offer their TPUs, and they saw the success of what happened with the original Kubernetes conformance program, which attracted a lot of people to the platform.”
Red Hat booth staff confirmed their plans to implement the conformance program and map their version of Kubernetes, OpenShift, to leading AI hardware, including CPUs, TPUs, and IBM’s new Tellum II mainframe processor.
Missing from the list of conformance program supporters is NVIDIA. “They’re not on the list, but they don’t really have a product that would qualify,” Aniszczyk said.
Other hot topics at this year’s KubeCon North America among the approximately 9,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors included observability, security, platform engineering, and configuration management.
Eric Newcomer is a principal analyst and chief technology officer at Intellyx. None of the companies mentioned in the article are current Intellyx customers. Chronosphere is a prior Intellyx customer. No AI was used to generate this content. CNCF covered the analyst’s attendance cost for the event, a standard industry practice. ©2025 Intellyx B.V. Photo: CNCF
