2026-02-02, 09:30–10:20, D.Aud
Infrastructure engineering has been built on predictability. If you specify the state, enforce it consistently, and eliminate drift, the system behaves as expected. Determinism was the goal and configuration management gave us the tools to get there. However, today’s AI models, agentic systems, and other probabilistic workloads break that mental model. You can deliver a perfectly reproducible environment and still see the application layer behave differently from run to run. The foundations didn’t fail; the workloads simply play by different rules.
This talk is about how to reason in that new world. When outcomes aren’t guaranteed, what can you rely on? How do you decide what must stay deterministic, and where you can safely allow randomness? How do you operate and troubleshoot when “it depends” becomes even more of a normal, expected answer? Instead of fighting to make probabilistic systems behave deterministically, we’ll explore how infrastructure engineers can build clarity, confidence, and reliability by embracing a different way of thinking; one that treats unpredictability as a property we can work with rather than a flaw we must eliminate.
Michael Stahnke is an engineering executive, having spent the last 15 years working in the development and operational tooling space where also did research and was an author on Puppet’s State of DevOps Reports.
Michael is VP of Engineering at Flox. He was previously in senior engineering leadership at CircleCI and Puppet. Where he grew engineering teams by 5x or more. He spent time building high performing teams, organizations and researching engineering effectiveness. He’s been speaking at DevOps, Security, and Automation events since 2007. He founded the package repository Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and wrote a book on OpenSSH in 2005.