Google Cloud unveils open AI-native stack on Kubernetes at KubeCon

[Google Cloud] Google Cloud said at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 that it is introducing and expanding a unified, open-source AI-native stack across Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). According to Google Cloud, the stack includes OpenRL, a Kubernetes-native post-training service; llm-d 1.0, an open distributed inference control plane with prefix-cache-aware routing, disaggregated serving and multi-tier KV cache management; Ray on GKE with KubeRay; Agent Substrate, an orchestration runtime for multi-turn AI agent workflows; gVisor, a kernel-level container sandbox; and TorchTPU, a backend providing native PyTorch support across Cloud TPUs and GPUs inside upstream vLLM and SGLang. Google Cloud said all of these components are CNCF Sandbox projects. The company said the stack is aimed at challenges including accelerator underutilization in RL post-training, cache-blind load balancing, framework fragmentation and agent security in multi-tenant clusters, and that it is offering sample manifests for users to try on their own Kubernetes clusters.