Episode 127: The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun

Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Whitney and Coté start with the keynote she gave in Amsterdam, where she flew a drone over 13,000 people so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged the audience was - it broke twice on stage, and Whitney, who was in the room, remembers nothing else from that day. Lin’s account of why it worked anyway is a checklist: a wow factor, something the audience does every day so they can relate to it, real engagement, and a planted surprise. From there they get into the part of co-chairing nobody sees, where three thousand submissions become about two hundred talks, how the AI-written ones get spotted, and why the CNCF cannot simply run a detector over the pile. The rest is open source as a job - twenty years of it, Istio at IBM through to Solo, and a straight answer to the question her own reports keep asking her, which is whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying you.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

• Lin Sun on LinkedIn, where she says she is most active.
• Solo.io - the book “AI Agents on Kubernetes” is a free download from the homepage, and is being refreshed for Salt Lake City.
• The Agentic AI Foundation and its five projects: Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, agentgateway, and the agent-to-agent protocol.
• Agent Substrate, the Google project that rethinks how agents get scheduled.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.
Header photo from the CNCF.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.