AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations

AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations

Author: Software Engineering Daily July 14, 2026 Duration: 53:04

AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work manually.

Mezmo is a Production AI company that makes autonomous operations fast, efficient, and safe. Their open source project, AURA, is a declarative agent framework specifically designed for SRE and platform engineering workflows. It takes a Kubernetes-inspired approach where teams define what they want agents to do rather than scripting every step of how to do it.

Andre Elizondo is the head of product at Mezmo, and he has a background in systems engineering, SRE, and observability. In this episode, Andre joins Kevin Ball to discuss what makes SRE agent workflows fundamentally different from coding agents, how AURA handles context engineering, AURA’s declarative configuration model, the spectrum of agent autonomy, and where the role of the SRE is headed as agents take on more of the operational work.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Mezmo.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive deep into the conversations shaping the future of artificial intelligence with the Machine Learning Archives-Software Engineering Daily. This curated collection pulls from the broader Software Engineering Daily library, focusing entirely on the intricate world of ML engineering. Each episode features a detailed, technical interview with engineers, researchers, and architects who are building the systems behind today's most advanced AI. You'll hear them break down complex topics like model deployment, data pipeline challenges, and the practical trade-offs involved in taking research from a notebook into production. The discussions are grounded in real-world implementation, moving beyond theoretical concepts to explore the tools, failures, and successes that define the field. For developers and technical leaders looking to understand the nuts and bolts of applied machine learning, this podcast offers a valuable archive of knowledge. It's a direct line to the practitioners who are solving hard problems every day, providing insights you can apply to your own work. Tune in to gain a clearer perspective on how machine learning is integrated into modern software, one detailed conversation at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Hype and Reality of the AI Coding Shift [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:05
AI coding tools have gone from novelty to core infrastructure in under three years. Today, many devs use AI daily, a substantial share of new code is AI-generated, and expectations for automation are rapidly increasing.…
Unlocking the Data Layer for Agentic AI with Simba Khadder [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:04
AI agents are increasingly capable of reasoning and performing autonomous work over long periods. However, as agents take on more complex, longer-horizon tasks, keeping them supplied with the right information becomes th…
Agentic Mesh with Eric Broda [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:23
AI agents are evolving from individual productivity tools into distributed systems components inside enterprises. The next frontier is coming into focus, and it involves large-scale ecosystems of collaborating agents emb…
New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:18
Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applicat…
Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:52
Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the u…
FastMCP with Adam Azzam and Jeremiah Lowin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:06
The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives developers a common way to expose tools, data, and capabilities to large language models, and it has quickly become an important standard in agentic AI. FastMCP is an open source…
SED News: OpenCode, AI Code vs. Shipped Code, and the LiteLLM Breach [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:42
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this epis…
FreeBSD with John Baldwin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:31
FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performan…
Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:30
Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. L…