OSS + ELC EU 2026

Open source underpins today’s cloud native and AI systems, from Linux and Kubernetes to emerging agentic frameworks. In this keynote Microsoft explores how open standards, collaborative governance, and shared security investments are shaping the agentic future of cloud computing. We’ll also cover how we’re applying lessons learned from the cloud native ecosystem to power the infrastructure of the AI native era, through collaboration on open source projects and interfaces.

Thousands of companies are currently solving the same problem in parallel: each writing their own code-writing agents, their own review prompts, their own quality gates, all privately deriving the same thing from the same public standards. But excellent engineering is not a competitive differentiator. It is infrastructure. Why would we all reinvent the same wheel? We did not each write our own kernel, we should not each write our own 'code writing' agents. Let's instead unify our efforts.

This talk introduces the AI Flower, a public capability architecture that codifies roughly 150 IT activities, defines excellence for each one grounded in industry standards, and maps their dependencies and risks into a living, regenerable knowledge graph: an open, tool-agnostic base for AI constitutions, agent skills, and quality gates that any engineer, team, educator, or company can build on.

The framework is deliberately concrete, so every claim in it can be challenged. That is the point. I will share what exists, what still needs validation, the foundation being established to govern it, and how you can contribute, because defining excellent engineering in the AI era is work that belongs to all of us, in the open.