In the era of agentic AI, attention has largely focused on data itself, while metadata has remained a neglected concern. Junping (JP) Du, founder and CEO of Datastrato, argues that this must change as AI fundamentally alters how data and metadata are consumed, governed, and understood. To address this gap, Datastrato created Apache Gravitino, an open source, high-performance, geo-distributed, federated metadata lake designed to act as a neutral control plane for metadata and governance across multi-modal, multi-engine AI workloads.

Gravitino achieved major milestones in 2025, including graduation as an Apache Top Level Project, a stable 1.1.0 release, and membership in the new Agentic AI Foundation. Du describes Gravitino as a “catalog of catalogs” that unifies metadata across engines like Spark, Trino, Ray, and PyTorch, eliminating silos and inconsistencies. Built to support both structured and unstructured data, Gravitino enables secure, consistent, and AI-friendly data access across clouds and regions, helping enterprises manage governance, access control, and scalability in increasingly complex AI environments.

Learn more from The New Stack about how the latest data and metadata are consumed, governed, and understood:

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Chris Aniszczyk, co-founder and CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), argues that AI agents resemble microservices at a surface level, though they differ in how they are scaled and managed. In an interview ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe, he emphasized that being “AI native” requires being cloud native by default. Cloud-native technologies such as containers, microservices, Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry provide the scalability, resilience, and observability needed to support AI systems at scale. Aniszczyk noted that major AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude already rely on Kubernetes and other CNCF projects.

To address growing complexity in running generative and agentic AI workloads, the CNCF has launched efforts to extend its conformance programs to AI. New requirements—such as dynamic resource allocation for GPUs and TPUs and specialized networking for inference workloads—are being handled inconsistently across the industry. CNCF aims to establish a baseline of compatibility to ensure vendor neutrality. Aniszczyk also highlighted CNCF incubation projects like Metal³ for bare-metal Kubernetes and OpenYurt for managing edge-based Kubernetes deployments.

Learn more from The New Stack about CNCF and what to expect in 2026:

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API sprawl creates hidden security risks and missed revenue opportunities when organizations lose visibility into the APIs they build. According to IBM’s Neeraj Nargund, APIs power the core business processes enterprises want to scale, making automated discovery, observability, and governance essential—especially when thousands of APIs exist across teams and environments. Strong governance helps identify endpoints, remediate shadow APIs, and manage risk at scale. At the same time, enterprises increasingly want to monetize the data APIs generate, packaging insights into products and pricing and segmenting usage, a need amplified by the rise of AI.

To address these challenges, Nargund highlights “smart APIs,” which are infused with AI to provide context awareness, event-driven behavior, and AI-assisted governance throughout the API lifecycle. These APIs help interpret and act on data, integrate with AI agents, and support real-time, streaming use cases.

IBM’s latest API Connect release embeds AI across API management and is designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, offering centralized governance, observability, and control through a single hybrid control plane.

Learn more from The New Stack about smart APIs:

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