Building AI that Doesn’t Break

MLOps Community Mini Summit #11! We talked to Elliot Gunton, Senior Software Engineer @ Pipekit, Qian Li, Co-Founder @ DBOS, Inc., and Alan Nichol, Co-founder & CTO @ Rasa

// Abstract
No YAML? No Problem: Orchestrate Kubernetes Workflows the Easy Way with Python 

Sick of writing orchestration logic in YAML? You’re not alone. Discover how Hera, the Python SDK for Argo Workflows, lets you express complex Kubernetes workflows using clean, testable Python code. Keep your business logic and orchestration logic in one place — no indentation nightmares required.

Building Reliable AI Applications with Durable Workflows
 
Chaining functions together is easy. Keeping AI workflows running when things go sideways? That’s the hard part. This talk introduces durable workflows — systems that checkpoint state, recover automatically, and gracefully handle everything from human delays to API flakiness. You’ll see real examples of AI pipelines that stay resilient in production.

Process Calling: Agentic Tools Need State
 
Function calling gave LLMs a way to "do" things — but it’s not enough. When you’re building agents for customer-facing use cases, stateless abstractions fall short fast. Learn why the future of agentic tooling is process-based, not function-based, and what it means to build agents that remember, recover, and reliably finish what they start.

// Bio:
Elliot Gunton
Elliot is a passionate maintainer of Hera, the Python SDK for Argo Workflows. At Pipekit, he is helping to bring scalable data pipelines to the Python world, unlocking the full potential of Argo Workflows for data scientists. Previously, at Bloomberg, Elliot supported Machine Learning engineers to accelerate their model retraining with Argo Workflows through Hera, simplifying the authoring of complex workflows. 

Qian Li
Qian is a co-founder of DBOS, Inc. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University in 2023, where her research focused on abstractions for efficient and reliable cloud computing. Qian also holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford (2019) and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Technology from Peking University (2017).

Alan Nichol
Co-founder & CTO of Rasa, doing chatbots since before they were good.

// Related links
https://qianli.dev/
https://www.dbos.dev/blog/what-is-lightweight-durable-execution 
https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-crashproof-ai-agents
rasa.com

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Connect with Elliot on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-gunton/
Connect with Qian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/qianli-dev/
Connect with Alan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anichol/

Timestamps
[00:00] Introduction
[02:00] No YAML? No Problem: Orchestrate Kubernetes Workflows the Easy Way with Python
[15:16] Building Reliable AI Applications with Durable Workflows 
[37:47] Process Calling: Agentic Tools Need State
[54:07] Q & A
[1:00:49] Wrap up