Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the previous post in this series, we covered why Virtual Machine (VM) Live Migration in Kubernetes is difficult: a VM’s IP is its identity, and the “new” VM on the destination node has to come up with the same IP, this something that Kubernetes is not known for, and on top of that, traffic has to switch over only after network security policies are in place.

Kubernetes is built for containers, and it’s been doing that since it used to run docker as an engine for its containers. But what if you want to add VMs to the mix? After all, containers are ephemeral and don’t require fixed IPs as they shift the identity toward labels, but VMs on the other hand are tied to IP addresses and in some cases MAC addresses. This brings us to this blog about VM migration and IP preservation.

There’s a question we hear constantly from platform and engineering leaders right now, “which agent SDK should we standardize on for our Kubernetes clusters?” The honest answer is that the question is slightly wrong, and the rest of this post explains why. But it’s a fair question, so let’s compare the contenders first.

We launched Lynx this week. Instead of restating the pitch, I want to explain how it’s built and why we made the architectural choices we did. If you run Kubernetes and you’re starting to put AI agents on it, this is roughly the system you’d end up designing yourself.

For a decade, one idea has guided everything we’ve built at Tigera: How do you secure a dynamic system with a lot of moving parts that is changing rapidly, with a programmatic approach? Calico has applied that idea for Global 2000 companies running the largest Kubernetes platforms in the world, securing tens of millions of mission-critical transactions every day. Today I’m excited to announce the next chapter of that work: Lynx, a unified control plane for Kubernetes-native AI agents.

The first post in this series argued that AI agent governance hasn’t kept pace with deployment. The second laid out the five pillars of accountability, and what is required. The third walked through why network policies, API gateways, MCP/A2A protocols, DIY security patterns, and Role-based Access Control (RBAC) each leave critical accountability gaps. So what does good look like? The five pillars define what AI agent accountability requires.

SIG Network introduced Ingress in 2015 as a minimal way to expose HTTP services from a cluster. That simplicity was an advantage at a time when most workloads were HTTP, clusters were single-tenant, and the occasional gap could be papered over with a vendor annotation.

You know every service in your cluster by name. You know which team owns each one, what it talks to, how it scales, where its logs go. The agents are a different story. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation, and it’s one we keep running into. Every company we talk to is shipping agents of some kind, from scales of 10s to 1000s. Customer service bots that field tier-one tickets. Internal copilots that draft emails and summarise meetings and write the boring half of every PR.

Kubernetes has come a long way since its debut in 2014. It’s gone from running a couple of containerized microservices to orchestrating fleets of production workloads spanning everything from AI agents to full scale VMs running in pods. As Kubernetes adoption grows, and its use cases stretch to cover more ground, managing its increasingly complex networking and security landscape demands operational maturity and a platform that supports it.

In The Five Pillars of AI Agent Accountability: A Diagnostic Framework for Engineering Leaders, we walked through each pillar of AI agent accountability (traceability, authorization provenance, identity and ownership, policy at scale, and human oversight) and argued that most enterprises today sit at Level 0 or Level 1 of the Accountability Maturity Model. The most common reaction we get when we share that framework is some version of: “We’re already covered. We have network policies.