ContextAudio · 0:39 — 2:09

Kubernetes was never designed for the bursty, resource-heavy, custom-image workloads that AI applications create — it's built for slow, steady web-server scaling — which is why Modal built a new runtime from scratch instead of using it.

Modal's CTO traces the company's founding insight: Kubernetes-based workflow orchestration was painful because Kubernetes is hard to manage and wasn't built for the burstiness and custom environments AI/ML workloads need. ✦ AI generated

Akshat Bubna · Latent Space · 2026-07-08 · original ↗

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“When you started, it was not the GPU inference company. Maybe it was in your mind. Take us back to the origin story.”

I first met Eric, who's the CEO, through an investor. Back then Eric was already thinking about building, a new runtime, and he got there thinking through why are workflow orchestration products so hard to use. It's because you have to run them on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is hard to manage. It's not built for burstiness and, custom images.

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0:39Modal’s origin and why Kubernetes wasn’t enough

▦ Modal ✳ Kubernetes ◉ Erik Bernhardsson

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Reinforcement-learning rollout workloads are so extremely bursty that they can require spinning up on the order of a hundred thousand sandboxes at once, far more bursty than typical agent workloads.Akshat Bubna · Latent Space · conf 60%