Alastair Cooke’s KubeCon 2025 takeaways highlight a shift from simply building Kubernetes to efficiently operating it at enterprise scale, with FinOps and cost optimization moving to the forefront through smarter autoscaling, tooling, and hybrid infrastructure reuse. AI’s role has become more grounded, with practical SRE-assist features, integrated AI tooling across the app lifecycle, and security gaps increasingly addressed by network security layers and proxies around fast-evolving AI platforms. Meanwhile, observability has resurged in importance thanks to OpenTelemetry’s rise as a unifying standard, enabling richer, AI-powered insights to keep pace with the growing complexity of Kubernetes environments.