The New Stack Podcast 2026 Will Be the Year of Agentic Workloads in Production on Amazon EKS
Nov 28, 2025
Mike Stefanik, Senior Manager of Product Management for Amazon EKS and ECR at AWS, shares insights on the evolution of Amazon's Kubernetes services. He discusses how AI workloads are transforming operations and emphasizes the shift towards agentic workloads, predicting a production breakthrough in 2026. Mike highlights the significance of user-friendly tools and knowledge bases, and explains how Kubernetes can efficiently manage these emerging workloads. He also shares his experience with internal agents that significantly boost productivity.
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EKS Shifted From DIY To Managed Platform
- EKS evolved from only managing the control plane to handling add-ons and worker nodes for customers.
- Mike Stefanik says AWS shifted EKS to be easier for late-majority users who don't want to manage everything themselves.
Design MCP Tools Around Tasks Not APIs
- Use task-oriented tools in an MCP server rather than exposing every API call to LLMs.
- Mike Stefanik recommends adding troubleshooting, runbooks, and full workflow actions to make agents effective.
Hosted Knowledge Bases Amplify Agent Power
- A hosted, up-to-date knowledge base greatly improves agent utility by surfacing current docs and support learnings.
- Mike Stefanik says bundling public docs plus historical support cases reduces support load and speeds troubleshooting.