Has AI Hijacked Cloud-Native Innovation?
Cloud Native Now, Tuesday, July 29th, 2025
It seems like AI is sucking the oxygen out of every room in tech right now.
From boardroom conversations to hallway chatter at industry events, everything's AI-this and AI-that. It's no surprise - it's exciting, disruptive and transformative. But in its meteoric rise, AI may be overshadowing other critical areas of tech innovation. And I can't help but ask: Has AI hijacked cloud-native?
Just a year or so ago, cloud-native was the darling of the enterprise tech world. We were knee-deep in Kubernetes conversations, excited about the rise of observability platforms, internal developer portals powered by Backstage, GitOps pipelines humming along, CNAPs getting smarter, and mesh architectures spreading like wildfire. Cloud-native wasn't just about moving to the public cloud - it was a foundational strategy for application modernization, hybrid environments, edge deployments and even bare metal.