Who Hosts the Kubernetes Podcast from Google and Who Are the Guests?

Updated

The Kubernetes Podcast from Google is hosted by Google's Kaslin Fields and Abdel Sghiouar, with guests drawn from across the cloud-native community — Google Cloud engineers, IBM developers, Grafana Labs staff, CNCF ambassadors, and SIG leads. The show is a weekly news and interview program, so the guest list rotates constantly; the most reliable way to judge an episode's credibility is to check the guest's stated role in the episode description.

Hosts

The episode descriptions name Kaslin Fields and Abdel Sghiouar as hosts. In episode #269, both are listed as the hosts interviewing Kat Cosgrove and Natali Vlatko. Beyond that, the site's public pages don't give detailed host biographies, so treat their specific roles at Google as unconfirmed unless you check a current episode page or the About section.

Guest profile

Guests are typically practitioners and project leads rather than outside commentators. Recent examples show the range:

Episode Guest Stated role Topic
#272 Tim Hockin Long-term software engineer, Google Cloud; described as "one of the fathers of Kubernetes" Agent Substrate
#272 Brandon Royal Product manager on GKE Agent Substrate
#271 Dipesh Rawat Software developer at IBM, CNCF Ambassador, CNCF Kubestronaut, SIG Docs Tech Lead, Release Lead for Kubernetes v1.37 Kubernetes 1.37
#270 Niki Manoledaki Staff Platform Engineer at Grafana Labs, CNCF Ambassador, Green Software Foundation Champion, core maintainer of Project Kepler Sustainability measurement via Project Kepler
#269 Kat Cosgrove SIG Docs Technical Lead, SIG Release Subproject Lead, Steering Committee member Kubernetes AI usage policy
#269 Natali Vlatko SIG Docs Co-Chair, Steering Committee member for the TODO Group, Open Source Architect at Cisco Kubernetes AI usage policy
#268 Jonathan Grahl Team Lead of Infrastructure at Lovable Agent Sandbox and Lovable

Two patterns stand out. First, guests often hold formal community roles — release lead, SIG Docs lead, CNCF ambassador — which makes their episodes useful for understanding how Kubernetes is actually governed and shipped, not just announced. Second, employer mix spans Google, IBM, Grafana Labs, Cisco, and startups like Lovable, so the show isn't limited to a single vendor's perspective.

How to judge an episode's credibility

Use the guest's stated role as your filter:

  • Release and governance episodes (#271, #269) feature people with named responsibilities in SIG Release, SIG Docs, or the Steering Committee. These are the strongest sources for process questions like how a release is led or why AI tools can't sign the CLA.
  • Project deep-dives (#270 on Kepler) feature core maintainers, so expect technical detail on the rewrite and measurement challenges rather than a general overview.
  • Product and platform episodes (#272, #268) feature Google or startup staff describing tools they build. Useful for architecture and design intent, but read as a builder's perspective.

For a specific guest's background, open the episode's "Read More" page — the description is where roles and affiliations are stated. The site's Episodes and About pages are the entry points for browsing the full list.