A Decade of CNCF: Fireside Chat with the CTO - OpenObservability Talks S6E07

In the opening episode of 2026, we mark a major milestone—a decade to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)—with none other than the CNCF’s CTO and co-founder, Chris Aniszczyk. Chris joins host Dotan Horovits on a fascinating fireside chat, looking back at the CNCF’s journey from a bold experiment into a central pillar of modern infrastructure. They discuss the current state of cloud-native, across Kubernetes and an ecosystem of over 200 projects, and share their grounded predictions for 2026 and into the second decade.

Beyond his role at the CNCF, Chris Aniszczyk serves as Executive Director of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), and CTO, Cloud & Infrastructure, at The Linux Foundation, the parent organization of the CNCF, OCI, OpenInfra and more. At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts. 

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/479e6bbf793c/

Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

01:51 - 10th anniversary to the CNCF

06:18 - the expanding scope of cloud native and Kubernetes

14:58 - the community expansion around the world

20:49 - KubeCon Europe

29:30 - consolidation of observability and security

34:00 - intersection of CNCF, FinOps and AI

37:35 - AI-generated code contribution for open source

43:46 - announcing the Agentic AI Foundation and MCP donation

53:00 - outro

Resources:

Observability for AI workloads: https://medium.com/p/b8972ba1b6baCNCF Ambassador’s

Reflections on 10 Years of CNCF: https://medium.com/p/a796646db552

Agentic AI Foundation formation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation

Socials:

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social

Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠

Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social

Chris Aniszczyk

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Twitter: @cra

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caniszczyk/   

Mastodon: @cra@macaw.social

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.