Now that the fall tech conference schedule has drawn to a close, it has become evident that open-source software (OSS) innovations continue to be a top priority among enterprise developers.
One of the industry’s mega, multi-vendor conferences, KubeCon, held in Atlanta, Georgia (US) in November, was well-attended by cloud platform heavyweights, many boasting agentic AI portfolios, of which OSS alternatives played a critical role.
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Open-source technology remains an important approach among developers and DevOps team members in general for a number of reasons, including access to affordable community-driven collaboration and the experimentation of emerging AI technologies; providing flexibility and customization to agentic AI development tools; easing feature and systems integrations; and streamlined deployment of modern apps across distributed environments.
Over the past year, early agentic OSS tools became available to enterprise developers, such as Microsoft AutoGen, conversational agents; Google’s agent development kit, a Python-based tool for creating AI agents; and LangChain, framework for building LLM-powered apps and agents.
A number of noteworthy OSS agentic AI events and projects were rolled out this fall and during KubeCon. Of particular interest among DevOps teams, cloud-native networking company Solo.io highlighted its progress in three high-profile agentic AI projects: Kagent, an agentic AI framework for building and running production agents in a cloud-native environment, including security and observability features; Agent Gateway a networking component that complements MCP and A2A protocols, to securely observe enterprises’ entire AI ecosystems; and Agent Registry, a centralised repository for AI applications and agents.
Other noteworthy Kubernetes and agentic OSS projects, which DevOps teams will be closely following in 2026, include:
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By GlobalData– Cisco AGNTCY, an infrastructure multi-agentic AI framework leveraging security, identity, and interoperability.
– Cisco OTel Injector, for zero-coding, automation instrumentation of application observability data.
– AIBrix and llm-d, for streamlining the building/scaling process associated with inference systems.
– Kube Resource Orchestrator (KRO), a collaboration between AWS, Google, and Microsoft to abstract infrastructure complexity for developers to enable self-service, auto-provisioning of the underlying application stack.
– Open Source Project Security (OSPS) Baseline framework for tiered security controls.
– OpenFGA, providing developers with fine-grained authentication controls.
– Cedar OSS, an Amazon sandbox project to enforce fine-grained access controls.
Progress in these OSS efforts among various infrastructure and app platform participants will dominate investment and news in 2026 as technology providers seek to improve customers’ business transformation requirements.
