Guest: Julian Fischer (LinkedIn)
Company: anynines
Show Name: KubeStruck
Topic: Kubernetes

As Kubernetes adoption accelerates, one problem keeps returning to the center: how do you deliver reliable, scalable data services to thousands of application developers without overwhelming platform teams? At KubeCon, I sat down with Julian Fischer, CEO & Founder of anynines, to explore how Klutch, a9s Hub, and more than a decade of Cloud Foundry experience are reshaping the future of developer platforms. Fischer explains why enterprises are rethinking their architectures, how data automation must evolve, and why AI workloads are quietly pushing the next wave of innovation.

KubeCon continues to be a bellwether for where the cloud-native world is heading. This year, the conversations around application development maturity, data services, and platform engineering took a noticeable shift — something Fischer has observed firsthand. As the CEO of anynines, Fischer has spent years helping organizations automate databases, run Cloud Foundry at scale, and transition to Kubernetes without losing reliability.

He noted that traffic on the show floor is always tied to booth location, but the conversations themselves have become more nuanced. “A few years ago, talking about data service orchestration across Kubernetes clusters was not very familiar,” he recalled. Today, engineering teams not only recognize the problem — they’re actively looking for solutions.

That growing awareness is what makes Klutch, the open-source framework from anynines, increasingly relevant. Fischer describes Klutch as a pivotal tool designed for a world where application developers demand self-service while enterprises must still keep data operations centralized and compliant.

At the heart of Klutch’s philosophy is a simple assumption: data service automation should not run inside application clusters. Fischer said the consensus across large organizations is clear — teams want the automation layer decoupled from the developer cluster, even when using Kubernetes operators. Klutch provides a consistent abstraction that makes databases feel “local” to developers, while allowing operators to run and scale automation centrally.

This approach becomes even more powerful when organizations operate many clusters across many environments. Klutch’s control plane allows teams to integrate one form of data automation and expose it across every application cluster. That abstraction makes it possible for development teams to describe their entire application — including databases — from their local Kubernetes environment, without ever touching separate tools or portals.

Interest in Klutch is rising, and Fischer says the design assumptions have been validated repeatedly in discussions with users. Early adopters are already running proofs-of-concept, taking the architecture from theory into practice. But he also emphasized that Klutch isn’t a drop-in replacement for everything. It’s a framework that needs to fit into a broader platform engineering strategy, particularly in environments where teams are experimenting with virtual clusters, custom developer experiences, and multi-cloud operations.

Where open source ends, commercial adoption begins — and that’s where a9s Hub comes in. Fischer described the Hub as the umbrella of automation products that extend Klutch with actual data service backends: VM-based services, Kubernetes-native services, upcoming AWS integrations for RDS and S3, and more. The Hub provides the automation that enterprises need to deliver real, production-grade data services.

The next major question many teams face is the evolution of Cloud Foundry. With VMware undergoing significant licensing and pricing changes post-acquisition, organizations are actively exploring alternatives. Fischer didn’t mince words: “We are the alternative to Broadcom these days.” a9s Cloud Foundry, backed by years of operational experience, is running hundreds of thousands of application instances around the world.

anynines has refined the art of zero-downtime migrations between Cloud Foundry environments, infrastructures, and even distributions. Teams that want the stability of Cloud Foundry without the constraints of new licensing models are increasingly reaching out to anynines.

The company also provides a bridge for teams straddling Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. For example, Fischer highlighted that Klutch includes a service broker that makes any Klutch-integrated service available in Cloud Foundry — eliminating the need to build new service brokers in 2025. That dramatically reduces operational overhead for organizations running dual environments.

a9s Hub itself has matured into a comprehensive suite: data services, Klutch, Cloud Foundry components, dashboards, and new Backstage-based UIs. One of the major announcements at KubeCon was CF App Stage, a modern, faster replacement for Stratos UI built directly on the Cloud Foundry v3 API. Rewriting it from scratch proved more efficient than refactoring legacy code, and the result is now available under the anynines licensing model.

Fischer also addressed the AI workload wave. He sees strong parallels between traditional database automation and what enterprises will soon need for LLMs, vector databases, and other AI tooling. anynines has already explored early product concepts for provisioning large language models on-demand, and the company is ready to build out deeper offerings if customers want them. Whether it’s AI-driven applications or data-heavy systems, Fischer believes anynines is positioned to provide the automation backbone teams need.

When discussing data services on Kubernetes, Fischer emphasized that while container-based operators work, VM-based automation still offers simplicity, scalability, and predictable performance. anynines continues to invest in both approaches, driven by what customers request and where the most mature tooling exists.

Ultimately, platform engineering continues to evolve, and Fischer sees anynines as a critical part of the new landscape. He pointed out that application delivery tooling on Kubernetes is growing quickly — and that brings back all the old data orchestration challenges from the Cloud Foundry era, now multiplied across environments. Klutch and a9s Hub aim to solve those challenges comprehensively, whether teams are all-in on AWS, hybrid, multi-cloud, or still navigating legacy migrations.

As Fischer put it, “If you plan an application developer experience targeting many clients, the data service challenge is non-trivial — and we believe a9s Hub is the solution.”