KASLIN FIELDS: Hello, and welcome to the "Kubernetes Podcast" from Google. I'm your host, Kaslin Fields.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: And I am Abdel Sghiouar.

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KASLIN FIELDS: We're back with a new episode after a long pause. We hope you missed us. This week, we speak to Amie Wei. Amie is a senior solutions engineer at HashiCorp and was the winner of last year's GKE Turns 10 Hackathon. It was Amie's first time entering Hackathon, and she ended up bringing the prize home with a cart-to-kitchen AI assistant. But first, let's get to the news.

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ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Kubernetes 1.36, codename Haru, is here. The new version introduced 17 enhancements. Of those, 18 have graduated to stable, 25 are entering beta, and 25 have graduated to alpha. We will be bringing the release lead on the podcast to talk more about this soon. Stay tuned for that episode.

KASLIN FIELDS: LLMD was donated to the CNCF as a sandbox project. Announced at Kubecon EU 2026, the project aims to provide the industry with well-lit paths for efficient inference on Kubernetes. The project was founded by Google Cloud, Red Hat, IBM Research, CoreWeave, and Nvidia, aiming to unite around a clear industry-defining vision-- any model, any accelerator, any cloud.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: The CNCF introduced the CARE program, or certification advancement and re-certification experience, a new policy to make maintaining certifications easier. Since most certifications expire after a while-- typically two years-- the CARE program addresses this by allowing advanced certifications to extend the validity of related foundational credentials.

For example, the Kubernetes and cloud native associate, KCNA, will automatically renew when a practitioner passes or recertifies on the Certified Kubernetes Administrator, CKA, or Kubernetes Certified Application Developer, KCAD. The CARE program will be fully implemented in June 2026 and will be effective as of January 1, 2027.

Agones moves to the CNCF, the open source platform for scaling and orchestrating dedicated game servers on Kubernetes, celebrates its official transition to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Originally founded as a co-development between Google and Ubisoft in 2017, the project is now being donated by Google to the CNCF at the sandbox level to foster a community-owned and governed future. Congratulations to the project team. And that's the news.

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I'm Kaslin Fields of the "Kubernetes Podcast" from Google, and I'm here at Kubecon Cloudnativecon North America 2025 in Atlanta, where I am speaking with Amie. Would you introduce yourself, please, Amie?

AMIE WEI: Yes, I'd love to. I am Amie Wei. I'm a solutions engineer at HashiCorp.

KASLIN FIELDS: We've been so excited to have you all day. We've been doing interviews with you kind of all day and for the whole week, really, the last few days, because you are our global winner of our GKE 10 Year Anniversary Hackathon. So would you tell me a little bit about your experience with the hackathon and what you built?

AMIE WEI: Yeah, this was my first hackathon and I'm glad to do it with Google on GKE. And I built an AI application that is an online grocery store, and I built an AI assistant that takes in the user's shopping cart and suggests recipes based on the ingredients, and that makes shopping for groceries and meal planning a bit easier.

KASLIN FIELDS: And to give folks a little background on this hackathon, the challenge was we have a couple of sample applications, online boutique and Bank of Anthos. And we've used those sample applications in, like, keynotes and presentations for years. And when we were thinking about how to celebrate 10 years of GKE and developers, we were thinking, you know, we want to get folks hands on, especially in this current era of AI where everything is new to everyone.

And so we wanted to give folks an opportunity to see what AI means for GKE. And we wanted to really focus on the agents and what you can do with AI, and the creativity of thinking about that new area. So we didn't want folks to focus on building the coolest Kubernetes infrastructure. We know people can do that. We want to see what kinds of agentic solutions and ideas people can come up with.

And thinking about it kind of in an enterprise use case businesses, you have an existing application and now you're getting the word from on high that you got to put AI into it somehow. So be creative with it and have some fun with it, and put some money behind it so then there's an incentive to explore it. And so that was the challenge, to take an existing application and to build on to it. And how did you approach that challenge?

AMIE WEI: Yeah, this was a really fun challenge. I think building on something existing is a very realistic challenge because very rarely, unless you're a startup, you're building something from scratch, you're usually looking at other people's code base and trying to figure out what the heck was built and what was the logic. And that was also kind of challenging for me because I was a solo developer. So I had to balance the programming aspect with the presentation, as well as kind of the storytelling aspect as well.

But AI has made that much, much easier and much more approachable for myself because I could have AI explain the code base to me and explain the new protocols. So for example, A2A for agent-to-agent-- as well as a EDK toolkit-- and have AI explain that to me. And I can ask all kinds of dumb questions and not feel super self-conscious about it. So yeah, it's very user-friendly.

KASLIN FIELDS: And this is your first hackathon solo developer. And about how long did you spend building your solution?

AMIE WEI: Yeah, it was on and off a little over a month, so took some time to come up with the idea of the grocery shopping experience. And then the programming and just getting everything fleshed out. And then the last portion, probably about a week, was on the presentation, as well as just putting all of the content together and checking off the list to make sure that I met the requirements.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, we had quite a few requirements for this hackathon, which I think is an important part of the design. We did encourage everyone doing this hackathon to use vibe coding to create their solutions, which I think is very interesting, probably scary to a lot of people because I think that's going to be the way that hackathons go now, is you're definitely going to get a lot of vibe coded solutions, so you might as well prepare for it.

So in our case, we really wanted to encourage people to try out that new technology to see what it could do, to see how it could help you build something that works and see your idea in action in a pretty short time frame. So how did that go for you? What kind of vibe coding tools did you use and what was that experience like?

AMIE WEI: Yeah, I used VSCode with Copilot, and then I tried the Gemini model. I think I tried the Cloud model as well, and then also the Gemini CLI just general questions. Let's see, what else did I use? NCP servers for the agent to look up documentation, because I think maybe because the protocols are pretty new. So the agent did have quite a lot of hallucinations, but looking up the documentation, the developer docs through the MCP server really helped improve some of that.

KASLIN FIELDS: That's a lot of different AI tools just going into your process of building the application, like the process around that, not the application itself, which also used AI. And you gave us a little overview earlier of what the application did, but could you speak a little bit to what areas within the application you thought AI was a good fit for, and where you used it?

AMIE WEI: It was fun to think about where AI could fit. For me, the main functionality was the recipe generation from a user's card. So creating the recipe as well as the image that goes with the recipe was done with the Gemini model as well as the imaging model, because I feel like with these large language models, there's still some creativity.

Like, the responses are not going to be the same every time, so there's a little bit of leeway. And I think recipes is a place where it's OK to have that variation. It could sometimes be a good thing. So I thought that was a good fit.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, that's a really good point. I hear a lot of summary use cases. It's really good at taking a bunch of information and summarizing it. I love the idea of it's non-deterministic. It's not going to do the same thing every time, so make use of that in the design.

AMIE WEI: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

KASLIN FIELDS: And so we talked a little bit about vibe coding and this being your first hackathon, and your idea. I wanted to also talk about the architecture that you chose, the different tools that you use and the requirements of the hackathon. I think in a world where people are vibe coding their solutions to hackathons, one way to manage the quality of the submissions that you get is to have a variety of different types of requirements.

And for this one, we require that folks had an architecture diagram, a GitHub repo with their code, video-- so a variety of different requirements. So how did you approach those requirements and the architecture that you built?

AMIE WEI: Yeah. Now it makes much more sense, given the requirement. And it's to make it a little more difficult and not rely on everything with AI use. I think for me, just understanding the requirements and making sure that I had enough time to tackle each of the requirements was really important.

I think some of the requirements being using the HA or ADK-- so understanding what those protocols and frameworks are, and then I think at the end when I was doing the final check to make sure that my submission met all the requirements, I fed the codebase as well as some of the content from the presentation, and then I asked AI to basically do a check against the requirements. So that was really useful.

KASLIN FIELDS: I think that's really common from what I saw in a lot of the submissions. It was like, well, they clearly checked off the box here, and here, and here. Also, in the code for a lot of the submissions, a lot of people didn't actually check off those boxes that they said they did in the perhaps AI-generated documentation.

But I think it's important to also look at the ways that you can use AI to complete the other pieces of the hackathon, and how that's different in the different pieces. So, like, vibe coding, you might be in a different mentality than when you're trying to guide the AI to help you write documentation.

Or some folks also used AI to help build their videos, like they used it to create B-roll, or as an AI voice to do the voiceover over for them. There's all sorts of ways that people used AI

AMIE WEI: That's true. Yeah. Yeah, you can get really creative with it. And it's really become a helpful assistant, or almost like a team member, which made this possible because I was the solo developer. I think maybe without AI, this would have taken much, much longer and my scope would have been reduced significantly.

KASLIN FIELDS: And I think that creativity of thinking about how to use AI is the benefit of doing this as a hackathon. A lot of folks, you're working in your day job and you're very focused on the quality of what you're building and building an enterprise grade solution that's going to be maintainable. And a lot of people worry about how AI fits into something that's long term like that.

Whereas with a hackathon and having all of these different requirements, and encouraging the use of vibe coding, we're saying just play around with it, see what works. And we wanted to show off the solutions and the winners, because a lot of folks are looking for use cases. Like, I'm being asked to do this, maybe I don't really want to do this in my day-to-day job. But how can you make it fun and how can you be creative with it to find use cases that are actually good?

So we really love that your solution was a very complete view of what you were trying to do. You defined your, like, it was a grocery store. And you were looking at the items in the person's cart to help inform the recipes, as well as if you didn't have something in stock. Like, how often are those coming up in the recipes that people are getting for their items? Or how often are people trying to-- I mean, I'm sure businesses do that already. Like, how often are people looking at that page when it's out of stock?

But you told a really good story of like both the business side and the user side, and then implemented the whole thing really effectively.

AMIE WEI: Thank you. Yeah, this was, again, just a really fun project because cooking and grocery shopping is a pretty big part of my life. So this was fun.

KASLIN FIELDS: And one more thing I want to talk about. It is the GKE 10 Year Anniversary Hackathon, but we were focusing on the agents and giving people an opportunity to play with the new AI tools. But how much did you know about Kubernetes going into it, and how much did you learn through the process?

AMIE WEI: Oh, boy. Well, I work at HashiCorp, so one of our products is Terraform. So Terraform, you can use it to spin up a lot of different services, including GKE. So I had a head start in that, and using Terraform has made the creation of the cluster much, much easier.

And then we also have other integrations with Kubernetes but more on the security side. So there's some experience, but I definitely learned a whole lot more through the hackathon, especially on the application development side, as well as, just incorporating AI and just seeing how the protocols actually work through a hands-on experience is really valuable, because that made it more tangible for me.

KASLIN FIELDS: I love to hear it. And one thing I didn't ask you earlier but I do want to ask about, is how did you find out about the hackathon and decide to go for it?

AMIE WEI: I found it online. I think it was through Reddit.

KASLIN FIELDS: My team made that post.

AMIE WEI: Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: My team made that post, so I'm very excited about that. And so to kind of wrap things up, for other folks out there who might be interested in going for hackathons and maybe thinking about gaming the system with writing their own agents or doing vibe coding-- I mean, we encouraged it here-- what advice would you have for folks who might want to try doing something like this?

AMIE WEI: Yeah, definitely dive in. And then, there's all kinds of tools out there. Take advantage of those tools and all the free credits and see what you can build, yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Amie.

AMIE WEI: Thank you.

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KASLIN FIELDS: That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on social media @KubernetesPod, or reach us by email at KubernetesPodcast@google.com.

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