LLMs at Scale: Infrastructure That Keeps AI Safe, Smart & Affordable // Marco Palladino// # 341

LLMs at Scale: Infrastructure That Keeps AI Safe, Smart & Affordable // Marco Palladino// # 341

Author: Demetrios October 7, 2025 Duration: 51:13

LLMs at Scale: Infrastructure That Keeps AI Safe, Smart & Affordable // MLOps Podcast #341 with Marco Palladino, Kong's Co-Founder and CTO.


Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn

Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter


// Abstract

While conversations around AI regulations continue to evolve, the responsibility for AI continues to be with developers. In this episode, Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong Inc., explores what it means to build and scale AI responsibly when the rulebook is still being written. He explains that infrastructure should be the frontline defense for enforcing governance, security, and reliability in AI deployments. Marco shares how Kong’s technologies, including AI Gateway and AI Manager, help organizations rein in shadow AI, reduce LLM hallucinations, improve observability, and act as the foundation for agentic workflows.


// Bio

Marco Palladino is an inventor, software developer, and internet entrepreneur. As the CTO and co-founder of Kong, he is Kong’s co-author, responsible for the design and delivery of the company’s products, while also providing technical thought leadership around APIs and microservices within both Kong and the external software community. Prior to Kong, Marco co-founded Mashape in 2010, which became the largest API marketplace and was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017.


// Related Links

Website: https://konghq.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odpPVeQZjHU https://www.thestack.technology/the-big-interview-kong-cto-marco-palladino/


~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~

Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore

Join our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]

Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)]

Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]

MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]


Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm

Connect with Marco on LinkedIn: /marcopalladino/


Timestamps:

[00:00] Agent-mediated interactions shift

[01:17] Kong connectivity and agents

[04:36] Transcript cleanup request

[08:11] MCP server use cases

[12:37] Agent world possibilities

[15:55] Business communication evolution

[18:55] System optimization

[25:36] AI gateway patterns

[31:30] Investment decision making

[35:54] Building conviction process

[41:34] Polished customer conversation

[46:37] AI gateway R&D future

[50:52] Wrap up


Hosted by Demetrios, MLOps.community is a space for honest, meandering talks about the real work of making artificial intelligence systems actually work. This isn't about hype or theoretical papers; it's about the messy, practical, and often surprising journey of taking models from a notebook into a live environment. You'll hear from engineers and practitioners who are in the trenches, discussing the tools, the frustrations, and the occasional breakthroughs that define the day-to-day. The conversations are deliberately relaxed, covering everything from traditional machine learning pipelines to the new world of large language models and even the intangible "vibes" of team culture and process. Each episode peels back a layer on what "production" really means, whether that involves deploying a predictive service, managing an agentic system, or maintaining reliability as everything scales. Tuning into this podcast feels like grabbing a coffee with colleagues who aren't afraid to dig into the technical nitty-gritty while keeping the tone conversational and accessible. It's for anyone who builds, manages, or is just curious about the operational backbone that allows AI to deliver value, offering a grounded perspective often missing from the broader conversation.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

MLOps.community
Podcast Episodes
The Control-vs-Magic Spectrum Building Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:18
Thiago Cardoso is the Director of Data & AI at iFood and the architect behind iFood Pago's AI agent platform. This fintech system serves millions of restaurants across Brazil through WhatsApp and the iFood app. In this e…
Logs Are All You Need: Rethinking Observability with AI Agents [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:39
Sherwood Callaway is the founder of Sazabi (YC P26), the AI-native observability platform built for engineering teams who ship fast. He previously founded and exited a YC company — now he's back, betting that logs are al…
AI Is Fast. AI Projects Are Slow. Let's Fix That. [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:47
Joe Maionchi (Co-founder & COO) and Rod Christensen (Co-founder & Chief Architect) of RocketRide join the MLOps Community to walk through AIDE — the AI Integrated Development Environment. RocketRide is an open-source AI…
Architecting Modern AI Systems: Platforms, Agents, and Integration [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:59
BuzzHPC Roundtable episode: Architecting Modern AI Systems: Platforms, Agents, and Integration Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinInGet the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletterMLOps GPU G…
[Special Announcement] MLOps Community Linux Foundation [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:19
Big news: the MLOps Community is joining the Linux Foundation to become the official user community of the new Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF). The AAIF is the neutral home for open source projects like the Model Context Pr…
Inside Just Eat's AI Lab: Voice Agents & Agentic Commerce [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:18:38
Guthrie Cooper (Senior Group Product Manager, AI & Robotics) and Nidhi Sharma (Global Head of Engineering AI & Incubation) from Just Eat Takeaway.com join the MLOps.community to pull back the curtain on how one of Europe…
Autonomous Agents at Work: From OpenClaw Hype to Enterprise Reality [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:19
Pramod Krishnan is a Managing Director - AI Managed Services at PwC, specializing in enterprise AI transformation — helping large organizations move from AI experimentation to production operating models. In this episode…
Agents are Just While Loops [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:11
Hamza Tahir, co-founder of ZenML, joins the show to cut through the hype around long-running agents — arguing that at the end of the day, an agent is just a while loop that talks to a model, calls a tool, and writes to a…
The Latency Goldilocks Zone Explained [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:13
Rafael (Head of Innovation, iFood) and Daniel (Data and AI Manager, iFood) pull back the curtain on ILO-Agent — iFood's conversational AI ordering system built for 200 million users across Latin America. Recorded live at…
Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:13
Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo is the AI PM at Despegar, the largest online travel agency in Latin America, and the engineer-product-hybrid behind Sofia, the GenAI travel concierge that beat most of the OTA world to a workin…