The Collision of AI, Data, and DevOps: Insights from KubeCon 2026

Hello and welcome back to Data Driven. This week, Frank is at KubeCon

2026, and he is noticing a pattern.

Kubernetes is about to make all of our artificial intelligence dreams

come true. Now here's Frank.

Hello, it's Frank here from

Data Driven. And you

don't know who I am. My name is Frank Lavinia, despite what the badge says.

They got rid of the law. I'm here in the expo center

before they start up. They're still setting up today. I don't think the

expo center opens up for another hour or 2, but I figured I would

do a quick livestream and I'm going to double down on my claim I made

yesterday. Let me get my headphones off. I'm going to double down on my claim

yesterday about how the AI world, the data world, saw how

that has collided. I think the next logical step

in the evolution of this is the collision of

the AI world and the data

world now colliding with DevOps. And from what I can tell,

data operations, DataOps is going to collide slightly differently. I think you're going to

have the monster that is data and AI or AI-related data

implementations colliding with DevOps separately than from good

old-fashioned DBA-type operations. The cool thing is

that conferences tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve. So if you

are wondering, like, where should I go next in my career or what I should

do next? I would definitely investigate that space because regardless of

what happens to one particular vendor because of a scandal,

you're going to see AI is not walking back. AI is not going to slow

down. AI, I think, is actually going to increase its footprint

on-premise because the token

prices, right? And that was the other theme that you see is control your token

costs. A few years ago, you said token, people would have thought you meant

Chuck E. Cheese or some kind of Bitcoin thing. But tokenomics now

is a rising term and point of concern for many CFOs,

definitely CFOs, probably also CEOs, as

well as chief IT officers. So I think we're looking at

a new world of AI where that is going to be a

hybrid world first. And I say this out of

personal experience, right? When I was at Microsoft, I was doing AI at Microsoft.

I was all in on Microsoft, all in on the cloud. And then I realized,

wait a minute, there's going to be some scenarios where I may not want certain

types of data to leave my house, right?

So then I set up my own home lab. I have the DGX Spark.

And actually, fun fact, I actually now have a Qlik instance

running in my home lab. And I tell you, it is, it has revolutionized

how I use AI. And I'm not just saying that because I'm wearing a Qlik

t-shirt. I'm telling you this as a home lab operator. And one of the reasons

I like having a home lab It's not because it is fun, but it is

also another home maintenance chore, right? But it lets me

LARP, live action role play, as a CIO

or a CTO, because that's de facto

what I am at my house. Because I have a home lab, I have my

family relying, the kids are relying on some of these services. My wife is the

CISO because she works in information security. So she always

lets me know when I do something wrong. But ultimately, I

think one of the things that I've seen as a home

labber is the impact of cost. If you're paying by

tokens, the whole subscription thing where you pay $20 a

month and you get unlimited or effectively unlimited,

those days I think are numbered because when Anthropic IPOs,

Wall Street is going to take a very different lens on a

publicly traded company than a Privately funded startup.

So I don't know that's going to happen days or weeks after the

IPO, but it's going to happen within a set period of time

after the IPO. So we're living in the golden age of

cheap tokens because they're subsidized. That's coming to an end.

And when that comes to an end, that $20 a month subscription could cost up

to $200, right? And an economy like this where people are

very anxious about AI taking over their jobs, Who is really going to pay

that for their own personal use? I don't know. But I can

tell you this, that the

reason I joined Click was I saw that they had a vision and I saw

that they had a vision to manage AI infrastructure, whether it's in the cloud,

whether it's in on-prem, whether it's

air-gapped, whatever. You as the administrator of the network, and I'm not,

I'm not an IT admin, right? I haven't done anything remotely resembling IT

specialized into development, client development, mobile development,

and then AI development. I know that,

I know what it is like some, some, some principles never change, but the core

thing here that I want to point out is these people are going to have

to work together, right? Admins, AI builders, AI data scientists, data

engineers, that sort of thing, as well as people who are consuming

AI, whether they're end-level consumers or developer-level consumers. When I say

end user consumers, people that just click on their phone or their app and then

they use AI. When I say developer consumers, the people that get an

endpoint and they can just consume, right? They hit the endpoint and they do what

it is. What really matters and what Qlik makes really easy

is the ability for administrators to take control

over their IT infrastructure through AI.

Because you can route based on content, based on query, based on

certain metadata about a request or just based on the size of the request,

all these sorts of things you have control. You can route it to a public

API. You can route it to a server running locally. I think we're

seeing the golden age of this is about to— one golden age is

going to end and a new one is going to start. And I think we're

entering the golden age of on-prem IT and self-hosted AI.

Just regardless of what Sam Altman gets mad about, people using RAM

for local AI use cases. But those days, I really think you're going to

see kind of these orchestrated systems where low

memory consumption AI models are going to make

decisions automatically for agents as to where they

get their intelligence from. So that's all I got. I'll walk you around real briefly

around the floor as we have. I'm going to do my extra

special tool here. We're at the Salt Palace, I think it's

called. Here, and we have the IBM booth, Everpure.

The Qlik booth is just over there. I'll be over there today,

booth number 276, I believe. So stop by and say hello.

In the meantime, I'm signing off.