Powering the Inference Era: Inside the DigitalOcean AI-Native Cloud

I’ve spent the last fifteen years building cloud services: early days of AWS building S3 and EBS, helping launch Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from inception, and now building the agentic cloud at DigitalOcean for AI-natives. Every cloud I’ve worked on was designed for the workloads of its era. Those clouds were built for human-centric SaaS applications: a few users, a handful of requests per session, predictable data flows. AI workloads break every one of those assumptions. AI runs in loops. Agents think, then act, then think again.