The New Stack Podcast

Turning a promising AI demo into a reliable, production-ready application requires more than powerful models. At AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose, Jeu George, Co-Founder and CEO of Orkes, joins The New Stack’s Nick Lucchesi to discuss the challenges of building mission-critical agentic applications and the infrastructure needed to support them.
George explains how Orkes Conductor helps developers orchestrate AI agents, manage failures, enforce security guardrails, and maintain audit trails for accountability and compliance. He also introduces ParticleDB, an agentic database designed to simplify enterprise data access while keeping sensitive information within company cloud environments.
Using examples from financial services and e-commerce, George explores when businesses should rely on AI agents, deterministic workflows, or human oversight. He emphasizes the importance of designing systems that anticipate failures, recover automatically, and provide visibility into every agent action.
Looking ahead, George predicts cheaper AI models, faster processing, and greater adoption of privately deployed agents will accelerate enterprise AI innovation.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments around building mission-critical agentic applications and the infrastructure needed to support them in the AI era:
Why Agentic AI Orchestration Is Key To Managing AI Complexity
A practical systems engineering guide: Architecting AI-ready infrastructure for the agentic era
The rise of agentic AI on Kubernetes: unleashing the new infrastructure layer
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At AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose, Mazin Gilbert, executive director of the Agentic AI Foundation, joins The New Stack’s Frederic Lardinois to discuss the rapid growth of agentic AI and the importance of open standards in shaping its future.
With 4,300 conference registrants and a rapidly expanding membership, the foundation is bringing together technology giants, startups, nonprofits and enterprises to address challenges around scalability, security, interoperability and governance. Gilbert explains how protocols like MCP are fueling a new economy of startups while enabling competing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, to collaborate on shared infrastructure.
The conversation explores the foundation’s approach to adopting new open source projects, expanding global participation through partnerships with organizations like the Gates Foundation, and encouraging meaningful community contributions. Gilbert also highlights emerging opportunities in agentic commerce, identity, trust, observability and physical AI.
Looking ahead, the foundation aims to accelerate standardization and expand its global community, ensuring agentic AI systems can scale securely without costly fragmentation.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments around growth of agentic AI and the importance of open standards in shaping its future:
The Architect's Guide to Understanding Agentic AI
The Agentic Web: How AI Agents Are Shaping the Web's Future
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As AI agents generate increasingly large volumes of code, traditional code reviews are struggling to keep pace. Shadaj Laddad, research lead for the Hydro team at AWS, believes the solution lies in automated correctness checks that operate outside an AI agent’s control.
Speaking at AGNTCon + MCPCon, Laddad explained how Hydro, an open source Rust framework for distributed systems, uses compile-time checks to catch bugs before code runs. Inspired by Rust’s borrow checker, Hydro aims to provide shared, domain-specific guardrails that help developers maintain reliability even as agents produce larger, more complex code changes.
The team is also exploring safeguards for recurring challenges such as idempotency, ensuring retried requests don’t execute twice. Laddad also highlighted Infinity, an open source runtime designed to support massive agent concurrency by suspending idle agents awaiting external operations. Developed jointly by AWS and UC Berkeley, Hydro and Infinity represent efforts to make AI-driven software development more scalable, efficient and trustworthy.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments around front end frameworks:
AI-generated Rust compiles perfectly. That's the scary part.
Do Frontend Frameworks Still Matter? A Thread
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Many Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers function as basic APIs, returning data without guiding AI agents on what to do next. AWS Principal Developer Advocate James Ward believes MCP servers should play a more active role in agent workflows, providing context, recommendations and actionable next steps.
Speaking at AGNTCon + MCPCon in San Jose, Ward explained how better observability and evaluation can improve agent performance. Because MCP lacks built-in trace IDs, AWS uses session identifiers to track tool calls across workflows, helping developers understand how agents interpret requests, identify inefficiencies and complete tasks.
By analyzing these interactions, teams can refine tool descriptions, introduce more efficient capabilities and measure improvements through evaluations. Ward also emphasized that MCP isn't always the best integration approach, noting that AWS evaluates alternatives such as command-line interfaces and skills.
Ultimately, Ward advocates applying established software engineering practices to agentic AI: observe workflows, identify problems, test improvements and continuously optimize how humans and AI agents collaborate to accomplish tasks.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments in rapid evolution of developer and agent experiences:
The 3 roles AI agents play in your developer platform
Your agent context needs a development lifecycle
AWS open-sources an AI agent it says is 45% cheaper than Claude Code and Codex
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Kubernetes has become the dominant container orchestration platform, used by more than 80% of container users, but widespread adoption hasn’t eliminated tensions between developers and operations teams. Developers value Kubernetes for its self-service capabilities and ability to move quickly, while operations teams prioritize stability, governance and controlled change. In this episode, HPE Fellow David Estes explains how those competing priorities are becoming more challenging as applications spread across hybrid and edge environments and AI inference workloads increase demand for GPU scheduling and rapid capacity scaling.
He also warns that excessive reliance on microservices can create unnecessary “architecture bloat.” AI, however, could help solve some of the complexity it is creating. Estes sees opportunities to use AI automation to monitor Kubernetes clusters, analyze logs, automate infrastructure tasks and potentially predict outages. With tools such as HPE OpsRamp supporting multicloud and on-premises environments, AI-driven operations could ultimately help developers and operations teams manage increasingly complex Kubernetes infrastructure more effectively.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest developments in HP Enterprise:
HPE's AI agents cut root cause analysis time in half
AI Is Quickly Making IT Teams and Developers From Invisible to Indispensable
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