Pop Goes the Stack

AI may be rewriting workflows and reshaping infrastructure, but this episode of Pop Goes the Stack argues that the future still depends on an old, unglamorous constant: DNS. F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Griff Shelley to unpack why “it’s always DNS” is more than a running joke when you’re building and operating AI systems at scale.

The conversation breaks down how modern AI stacks lean on DNS everywhere, from Kubernetes service discovery to reaching storage endpoints, analytics APIs, vector databases, and external model providers. As agentic traffic grows, the issue isn’t just more lookups, it’s a different traffic profile entirely. Agents behave like software, not people, producing bursts of legitimate, high-speed requests that can overwhelm assumptions built on caching and human-paced interaction. The result is that small DNS latency spikes can compound into visible stutter in chat experiences, slow agent workflows, and cascading bottlenecks across clusters.

Joel and Griff also explore how DNS is evolving from a simple directory into a potential carrier for trust and discovery, including emerging ideas like AI Agent Discovery, alongside more advanced routing needs such as global load balancing and selecting the best available compute resources.

The practical takeaway is straightforward: treat DNS as critical AI infrastructure. Know where your DNS lives across clouds and Kubernetes, measure its performance, and make it a priority before it becomes the hidden limiter of everything you’re trying to accelerate.