Show notes
In this episode of The Infra Pod, hosts Tim Chen (GP at Essence VC) and Ian Livingstone (CEO of Keycard) sit down with William Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Buoyant and creator of Linkerd, to explore how AI agents are reshaping the infrastructure layer — from service security to inference routing.Will traces Linkerd's origins to Twitter's 2014 migration from a monolithic Rails app to distributed microservices — the moment function calls became network calls that could actually fail. A decade later, that same communication layer is under pressure again. Non-deterministic agents make MCP and A2A calls over L7 protocols, and for the first time, fine-grained access control isn't optional: an agent will eventually find and call every reachable endpoint, including the one that deletes your database.The conversation covers the real pressure AI coding tools are already placing on platform teams — deploy cadences going from tens to potentially thousands per day — and what running inference inside Kubernetes actually means for proxies. Will breaks down why KV cache-aware routing is a 100x performance lever, why the modern inference proxy looks less like Envoy and more like a Makefile, and shares his spicy take on where compute is heading: in-cluster inference becomes the default, with frontier models reserved only for tasks that genuinely need godlike intelligence.[00:00] Guest introductions and Buoyant founding story[03:00] Linkerd's origin: solving Twitter's monolith-to-microservices migration[07:30] How AI is (and isn't) changing Linkerd today[11:00] MCP, A2A, and agents as L7 traffic in your cluster[14:30] Why agents make endpoint-level access control non-optional[18:00] AI as amplifier: what 10–1000x more deploys means for platform teams[21:30] Running inference in Kubernetes: a pathological workload[24:45] KV cache-aware routing and the 100x performance gap[27:00] The proxy/gateway landscape: grad students vs. premature standardization[29:30] The inference proxy is a Makefile now, not Envoy[31:00] Prompt injection, sandboxing, and the security problems with no clean answer[33:00] Spicy Future: in-cluster inference becomes the default