This is the first newsletter-style roundup since July, so it covers a packed few weeks — from KubeCon Japan in Yokohama to Red Hat Summit in Atlanta, a personal trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony, and two Amsterdam meetups. Here is what I have been building, speaking about, and writing, plus the trends I am watching in AI platform engineering.
Latest initiatives & events I attended
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026 — Yokohama. The Japanese cloud-native community is running real AI and Kubernetes in production at a scale worth learning from. Two takeaways stood out:
- Photonic networks could reshape the AI data center by moving data optically — Fujitsu is leading this work in Japan.
- Tuning Kubernetes for AI is the real story: it is not “more GPUs,” it is LLM caching and routing and the true GPU, memory, and electricity cost.
Red Hat Summit 2026 — Atlanta. I delivered a lightning talk, “GPUs take flight: Safety-first multi-tenant Platform Engineering with NVIDIA and Red Hat OpenShift AI,” covering isolation patterns, platform engineering, and production-tested guardrails for sharing expensive GPUs safely. A short booth pass even turned into a Docker Captain announcement moment.
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony 2026 — 6 August. I attended in person. The minute of silence, 120 nations, and two hibakusha testimonies were a powerful reminder of why we build the things we build.
AI Builders Amsterdam — 19 August (StartDock) and BrowserStack Meetup Amsterdam — 20 August. Two hands-on meetups: validating side projects, writing docs for agents, running local LLM agents, and how Claude plus Playwright are reshaping QA.
Coming up: EDGECASE 2026 — 24 September, Hilversum. The Netherlands’ biggest Kubernetes event (400+ cloud-native engineers, hosted by Bart Farrell). I will be there — save the date.
Latest trends I am watching
- GPU multi-tenancy is finally real. Fractional GPU allocation (the NVIDIA DRA driver), GPU-aware scheduling (KAI Scheduler), and
llm-dfor splitting inference into prefill and decode are landing in the CNCF. Sharing GPUs safely is the number-one cost lever for 2026. - Agentic AI is getting an identity layer.
kagent(agents as Kubernetes CRDs) andkagenti(cryptographic SPIFFE/SPIRE identities for agents) turn agents from “rogue processes in a notebook” into governed, observable, RBAC-controlled resources. - Local and edge agentic models are shipping. Meta’s open-source Muse Glimmer (30B) runs under 20 GB on a consumer GPU via 4-bit quantization — private, offline agentic AI is no longer a lab curiosity.
- Sovereign and compliant AI is now a platform requirement, not a nice-to-have. Data residency and audit-readiness are spreading globally.
New articles this month
AI & platform engineering
- Photonic Networks: the Standout Tech at KubeCon Japan 2026
- Tuning Kubernetes for AI: the Real Trade-offs from KubeCon Japan 2026
- Model Soups: Better Fine-Tuning by Averaging Weights
- Soup: Fine-Tune an 8B Model on a 4 GB GPU
- Meta Muse Glimmer: A 30B Agentic Model for Your GPU
- Netris Raises $15M to Automate AI Neocloud Networks
- Fish Audio Raises $52M Seed for AI Voice Models
Platform & engineering
- Astro Responsive Images: 50% Smaller with AVIF, WebP
- Azure Linux 4.0: Microsoft’s First-Party Linux in Preview
- Claude Code Usage Limits: Session vs Weekly
- YAGNI: You Aren’t Gonna Need It
- Four UI & AI Tools I’m Watching in 2026
Conferences & events
- Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony 2026: Attending in Person
- AI Builders Amsterdam: A Hands-On AI Meetup Recap
- BrowserStack Meetup Amsterdam: AI’s Impact on QA
- EDGECASE 2026: Gotta Catch ‘Em All
Latest on YouTube
- Heading to KubeCon Japan 2026 in Yokohama — Bring Me Your AI & Kubernetes Stories
- A Quick Snapshot from Red Hat Summit 2026 Show Floor (Atlanta)
Work with me
Building an AI platform that needs to pass the audit? I help DevOps, cloud, and platform engineers take AI from demo to production — with governance, cost control, and GPU orchestration built in from day one.
- Book a free 30-min AI & Cloud consultation
- Join the AI Platform Engineer Bootcamp
- Claude Code Masterclass on Udemy
See you at EDGECASE 2026 in September — and thanks for reading.
