The open platform for the AI era: GKE, agents, and OSS innovation at KubeCon EU 2026

As the cloud-native community gathers in Amsterdam for Kubecon + Cloudnativecon Europe this week, we’re excited to highlight some of the work we are doing to support both the open-source Kubernetes ecosystem and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). From breaking down the walls between cluster operating modes to making Kubernetes the absolute best place to run AI agents and Ray, here’s a look at what we are rolling out. Autopilot for everyone Five years ago, we introduced GKE Autopilot , a fully managed GKE experience that dramatically simplified scaling and infrastructure management. Previously, choosing between GKE Autopilot mode and Standard mode was a "fork in the road" decision made at cluster creation time. If you started with Standard and later wanted to switch to Autopilot, you had to create an entirely new cluster. This created friction for organizations managing mixed clusters, where some workloads required strict node-level control while others needed seamless, hands-off scaling.