DOP 347: Cozystack Turns Bare Metal Into a Managed Services Platform

#347: Andrei Kvapil has been around Kubernetes since the early days. Contributor to Cilium, Kubevirt, and a handful of other projects you probably use without realizing it. He is also the maintainer of Cozystack, a CNCF sandbox project, and the CEO of Aenix, the company behind it.

The thesis: Kubernetes should be boring. Not exciting, not cutting-edge, not the thing everyone argues about. Boring like the Linux kernel is boring. Something that sits underneath everything and nobody needs to think about. Viktor takes it one step further and says it should be invisible – developers should never need to know Kubernetes exists, any more than they need to know what kernel their laptop is running.

Cozystack is Andrei’s answer to a specific problem. ISPs, banks, finops shops, anyone in Europe who cannot or will not put their data in AWS – they all want to offer managed databases, managed Kubernetes, object storage, the whole stack. Building that from scratch is hard. Running OpenStack requires a dedicated team that does nothing but tune networking. Cozystack bundles the pieces (Kubevirt, CloudNative Postgres, Cilium, etc) into one product with an aggregation API layer on top of Kubernetes itself. Helm becomes the extension language. The platform becomes a product.

Then the conversation takes a turn. Andrei is the CEO of a bootstrapped company and he says flatly that without AI the company would not exist. Claude Code is moving Kanban cards. Clients send files generated by their AI agent and Aenix feeds those files to their AI agent to generate the response. Andrei’s only wish is for this middle step – him – to stop existing. Let the agents talk to each other and call him when something actually matters.

There is a hiring question in here too. If the next generation of engineers starts their career with AI on the first commit, do they ever build the mental model that lets them guide the agent when it goes wrong? Andrei thinks you still need deep understanding for anything serious. Viktor agrees. Speed versus quality is still a choice, and juniors who skip the write it three times until it stops being garbage phase are going to feel that gap eventually.