Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
In this lively AMA livestream, Viktor is joined by Scott and surprise guest Amin, a software engineer at AWS who works on the ACK, KRO, and KROW projects. The trio tackles a wide range of community questions spanning the future of DevOps in the AI era, platform engineering best practices, and the evolving role of software engineers versus programmers. They discuss how DevOps professionals should think about designing tools and APIs that can be consumed by both humans and AI agents, including MCP tools, agentic workflows, and the importance of exposing well-designed APIs rather than relying solely on web UIs.
The conversation dives deep into several technical topics, including migrating from Crossplane 1.0 to 2.0 (covering namespaced resources, deployment runtime configs, and managed resource activation policies), the retirement of NGINX Ingress and why Gateway API is the clear migration path forward, and a nuanced comparison of Crossplane compositions versus KRO and ACK for managing cloud resources. The hosts also share their takes on using OpenTelemetry (OTLP) for business telemetry, the state of configuration languages like KCL and Carvel, the Argo CD versus Flux debate (with flux described as alive and well after its rocky period), and practical career advice for DevOps engineers looking to level up their programming skills. Throughout, the panel emphasizes that AI tools like Claude Code are powerful accelerators but require genuine engineering expertise to use effectively in production environments.
▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Intro (skip to first question)
05:43 What is the future of DevOps in AI?
10:03 Using OTLP for business-related telemetry?
11:28 Upgrading Crossplane from 1.0 to 2.0 experience
20:00 Is KCL dead or getting more attention?
23:48 What makes a programmer in the AI era?
28:50 How are you managing memory of agents?
30:24 What DevOps tasks will AI agents automate?
36:48 Nginx retirement: is Nginx Plus least risk migration?
39:39 F5 Nginx Plus migration one-to-one compatibility?
40:48 Selecting a gateway API to replace Nginx ingress
49:20 Crossplane 1-to-2 migration airgap/RBAC pitfalls
53:39 Driving DevOps adoption in a company with no DevOps culture
57:54 Crow plus SDK vs Crossplane advantages?
63:23 Argo CD vs Flux: which should you choose?
67:19 Tools to monitor crossplane hub-and-spoke IDP platform
71:12 Career advice: should I learn Go or Python?
75:48 Should you just learn specs and use Claude Code instead?
In this lively AMA livestream, Viktor is joined by Scott and surprise guest Amin, a software engineer at AWS who works on the ACK, KRO, and KROW projects. The trio tackles a wide range of community questions spanning the future of DevOps in the AI era, platform engineering best practices, and the evolving role of software engineers versus programmers. They discuss how DevOps professionals should think about designing tools and APIs that can be consumed by both humans and AI agents, including MCP tools, agentic workflows, and the importance of exposing well-designed APIs rather than relying solely on web UIs.
The conversation dives deep into several technical topics, including migrating from Crossplane 1.0 to 2.0 (covering namespaced resources, deployment runtime configs, and managed resource activation policies), the retirement of NGINX Ingress and why Gateway API is the clear migration path forward, and a nuanced comparison of Crossplane compositions versus KRO and ACK for managing cloud resources. The hosts also share their takes on using OpenTelemetry (OTLP) for business telemetry, the state of configuration languages like KCL and Carvel, the Argo CD versus Flux debate (with flux described as alive and well after its rocky period), and practical career advice for DevOps engineers looking to level up their programming skills. Throughout, the panel emphasizes that AI tools like Claude Code are powerful accelerators but require genuine engineering expertise to use effectively in production environments.
▬▬▬▬▬▬ ⏱ Timecodes ⏱ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 Intro (skip to first question)
05:43 What is the future of DevOps in AI?
10:03 Using OTLP for business-related telemetry?
11:28 Upgrading Crossplane from 1.0 to 2.0 experience
20:00 Is KCL dead or getting more attention?
23:48 What makes a programmer in the AI era?
28:50 How are you managing memory of agents?
30:24 What DevOps tasks will AI agents automate?
36:48 Nginx retirement: is Nginx Plus least risk migration?
39:39 F5 Nginx Plus migration one-to-one compatibility?
40:48 Selecting a gateway API to replace Nginx ingress
49:20 Crossplane 1-to-2 migration airgap/RBAC pitfalls
53:39 Driving DevOps adoption in a company with no DevOps culture
57:54 Crow plus SDK vs Crossplane advantages?
63:23 Argo CD vs Flux: which should you choose?
67:19 Tools to monitor crossplane hub-and-spoke IDP platform
71:12 Career advice: should I learn Go or Python?
75:48 Should you just learn specs and use Claude Code instead?
