The New Platform Engineering Challenge: AI, Kubernetes, and Governance

Over the past decade, cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes have become the foundation for how enterprises build and run software. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has catapulted from experimentation to mainstream adoption. This convergence is reshaping not only how applications are created but also how they are implemented, secured, and governed.

As the creators of Kyverno, the leading open-source policy-as-code engine for Kubernetes, we’ve seen firsthand how organizations use policies to define intent, enforce standards, and manage risk. Kyverno excels at surfacing issues and helping teams understand where their guardrails may be failing. But detection alone isn’t enough. Teams are still left with the burden of figuring out how to remediate issues, apply fixes across environments, and maintain compliance at scale.

This is why platform engineering has become both the bottleneck and the enabler of the AI future. Without scalable governance and guardrails, platform engineering slows down innovation. But with automated policy enforcement and governance, platform engineering becomes the discipline that unlocks velocity, resilience, and trust—creating the foundation AI needs to thrive.

The question is no longer IF we need AI, but how we can establish effective guardrails, controls, and compliance without slowing down innovation. That’s where AI for platform engineering comes in.

What is AI Platform Engineering Assistance?

Platform Engineering has traditionally been manual, fragmented, and reactive. Policy-as-code tools like Kyverno changed that by enabling teams to define and enforce policies directly in Kubernetes. Kyverno is highly effective at finding misconfigurations and violations, but closing the loop—determining how to remediate them and ensuring consistent policy enforcement and compliance across Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)—still requires significant manual effort.

Now AI takes the next step. With AI-powered policy-as-code, and autonomous remediation, platform engineering becomes:

• Faster – AI can translate human intent into Kyverno-compatible policy in plain language.
• Smarter – AI can group violations by urgency and impact, helping teams prioritize.
• Automated – AI remediation agents can resolve misconfigurations across Kubernetes and IaC pipelines.
• Scalable – Unified controls and guardrails span Kubernetes clusters, IaC, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

In short: AI transforms platform engineering from a static set of rules into a dynamic, intelligent system that continuously enforces policies and compliance at scale.

Why Enterprises Need AI-Driven Policy Enforcement

Today’s enterprises face four realities:

1. Scale and Complexity: Hundreds of clusters, thousands of nodes, and sprawling IaC repositories make manual enforcement impossible.
2. Rising Regulatory Pressure: From finance to healthcare, industries must prove compliance across both Kubernetes and IaC environments.
3. Operational Burnout: Platform and security teams are inundated with violations, alerts, and repetitive toil.
4. Inconsistent Rules: Disparate and even contradictory policies

Without automation, controls and compliance become bottlenecks — slowing down developers and creating risk exposure. AI for platform engineering flips this equation on its head. Instead of reactive policing, teams gain proactive guardrails and automated policy enforcement powered by Kyverno that ensure security, compliance, consistency, cost optimization, and resilience – all while preserving developer velocity.

Why AI Platform Engineering Matters Now

The timing is no coincidence. Several forces make AI for platform engineering both possible and urgent today:

• AI Maturity: Large language models and agentic AI can now handle specialized tasks such as authoring, remediation, and validation of policy-as-code.
• Kubernetes Ubiquity: With Kubernetes as the standard and Kyverno as the most widely adopted policy-as-code engine, enterprises need automation to scale.
• Cloud-Native Scale: Enterprises are running infrastructure at an unprecedented size and complexity, spanning Kubernetes, IaC, and multiple clouds.
• Regulatory Landscape: Compliance expectations are tightening, with real penalties for failures in governance and security.

We’ve reached an inflection point where governance must evolve. AI is no longer optional – it’s the only way to keep pace.

The Nirmata Value: Automating the Policy-to-Action Loop

At Nirmata, we believe AI should empower platform engineering, not burden it. That’s why we’re building the industry’s first AI platform engineering assistant on top of Kyverno.

Kyverno has become the standard for policy-as-code in Kubernetes because it’s excellent at defining guardrails and surfacing issues quickly. But detection alone isn’t enough. Teams still struggle with the manual effort of deciding what to fix, how to fix it, and ensuring those fixes are applied consistently across Kubernetes and IaC environments.

This is the gap Nirmata fills. Our vision is simple:

• Find – Detect misconfigurations and violations across Kubernetes and IaC with precision.
• Fix – Use AI remediation agents to resolve issues instantly, reducing toil and closing the loop.
• Govern – Establish ongoing, scalable compliance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

 

Meet the AI Agents of Governance

Nirmata’s AI platform engineering assistant introduces specialized agents that work together to close the loop from detection to remediation to compliance. 

Together, these agents extend Kyverno’s detection capabilities into a complete AI platform engineering assistant, helping platform engineering evolve from bottleneck to supercharger. 

With our open-source leadership in Kyverno and enterprise innovations in AI, we’re pioneering a platform engineering model where policy-as-code evolves into policy-as-intent—bridging the gap between human intention and machine enforcement.

Policy enforcement should no longer be a tax on innovation. With AI, it becomes a multiplier.

Looking Ahead: Intent-Base Infrastructure and Continuous Compliance

Platform engineering sits at the center of the AI revolution. Without proper governance, it risks becoming a bottleneck—overwhelmed by scale, regulation, and complexity. But with AI assistance, platform engineering transforms into the supercharger of the AI future: creating systems where compliance is continuous, remediation is automatic, and innovation flows without friction.

The future of governance is intent-based infrastructure, where teams describe the outcomes they want—secure, compliant, cost-optimized environments —and AI ensures those outcomes are enforced everywhere, from Kubernetes clusters to IaC pipelines.

This is the world we’re building at Nirmata: a world where AI assistance sits alongside platform engineering, continuously watching, fixing, and governing systems so humans can focus on creation instead of firefighting.

The need is clear, the technology is ready, and the time is now.