Episode 25: Ep 20: Future of Cloud-Native Data Services with AI and Agents
Sergey Pronin, founder of Solanica and former Percona engineer, joins the panel to discuss why the SaaS-only data model is fracturing. The conversation covers 'Dark Matter Data' trapped inside enterprises, treating databases like cattle on Kubernetes, API-driven self-service provisioning, and why donating Open Everest to the CNCF matters for license-stable infrastructure.
Special Guests
Sergey Pronin
Founder of Solanica and former Percona engineer, building Open Everest, a Kubernetes-native platform for running databases as portable, self-service infrastructure.
Timestamps
00:00Intro: The intersection of Cloud-Native Data and AI Agents01:04Meet Sergey Pronin: From Percona to Founding Solanica02:20The 'Lego Mindset': Building interchangeable infrastructure blocks06:09Data as Fuel: Why 80% of valuable data is 'Dark Matter'08:52The Risk of Model Collapse11:35The Resurgence of Postgres13:06Building on Open Everest and the Sovereign AI niche15:21Databases as Containers: Portability without vendor lock-in16:59Persistence on Kubernetes: Treating databases like cattle18:26Decoupling storage and compute21:15When Agents Control the Data: API-driven provisioning26:37Internal Development Platforms (IDPs) and private RAG33:48Short-term vs. Long-term Memory for agents35:08The 'Internet of Agents'38:12The Reliability Threshold: Trusting an agent42:53Open Source Strategy: Donating Open Everest to the CNCF46:28Building Community: The 'Two Bucket' approach50:56Closing ThoughtsRelated Episodes

Episode 36: Removing Data Consistency Bottlenecks : Building High Margin Scalable AI Business on Cloud
Joe McCunney, CEO of Scalar Labs, makes the case that reliable, consistent data across environments is the hidden bottleneck for enterprise AI, especially in large organizations juggling 300+ database types. He explains how ScalarDB acts as a database-agnostic binder that connects multiple data sources and treats them as a single database, and how the company's open source refactoring agent generates architecture docs and migration plans that cut enterprise design time by up to 85%.

Episode 33: Open Source Survival in the Age of AI: Joshua Drake on Licensing, Governance & Monetization
Joshua Drake, President and CTO of Command Prompt with nearly 30 years in the PostgreSQL community, lays out the risks AI creates for open source: extraction without attribution, model collapse, AI-generated security holes, and legal exposure from derivative work. He argues that proof of human contribution, signed origins, and governance with humans in the loop matter more than ever, and shows how commercial open source companies can adopt AI without losing community trust.
![Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wVRZe8xhymQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Episode 30: Building the Business Behind Open Source AI @ AWS San Francisco [Live]
A live panel recorded at AWS San Francisco bringing together open-source AI founders and builders from Zep AI, DataRobot, Command Prompt, Scalar Labs, StreamNative, and Omnistrate. The group moves past technical specs to share strategic and personal reflections on how open source AI teams deploy, scale, and monetize.
