From Containers To Agents: The Next Cloud Native - Di Xu, Xiaohongshu

Every major computing shift creates a new unit of work.Virtual machines gave us infrastructure automation. Containers gave us portable applications. Kubernetes gave us a control plane for distributed systems.Agents may become the next unit of work.An agent is not just an LLM call. It has identity, memory, goals, tools, permissions, execution state, and the ability to affect the outside world. It can fail in ways that traditional software does not: by taking the wrong action, using the wrong tool, leaking context, exceeding its authority, or behaving differently as its models and environment evolve.The industry is rapidly building agent demos. The harder problem is operating agents in production.This keynote proposes a cloud native view of agent infrastructure: agents as first-class workloads with declarative configuration, policy-driven tool access, observable decision paths, isolated execution, durable state, continuous evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls.Rather than treating agent infrastructure as a proprietary layer above Kubernetes, we have an opportunity to apply the lessons of cloud native computing—open interfaces, reconciliation loops, composable primitives, and policy as code—to make autonomous systems safer and more portable.The question is no longer whether agents will run in production. The question is whether we will build the infrastructure needed to trust them there.