MLOps Community 2.0

It was March 2020. We were all stuck inside, doomscrolling through pandemic updates, and I did what any reasonable person would do in a crisis: I started a Zoom call. I knew very little about programming at the time. Even less about machine learning. But I’d been obsessing over this idea that was floating around under the awkward name “DevOps for machine learning.” MLOps. I wanted to find the people who were trying to do it in the real world. So a few of us started getting together every week. Talking through problems. Answering questions in a Slack workspace that slowly, then very quickly, started filling up. Looking back, I was the least technically qualified person in almost every conversation. Luckily for me, these were people who spent their days training models, so they had some practice with things that needed a few passes before anything useful came out. Not only were they patient, they were generous - with their time, knowledge, and encouragement. That generosity became the culture. And the culture became everything. WHAT WE BUILT Not long after ChatGPT landed, we held a round table on putting LLMs into production. I remember the energy in that call, realizing something had shifted. We were all discovering this new technology together. The community leaned in hard: sharing what was working, what was failing spectacularly, and what nobody had figured out yet. That spirit of open sharing is what turned a Zoom call into a community that supports over 150,000 developers and engineers. You know the importance of data, so I'll share some: * 31k Slack members * 1.5M Slack messages sent * 15k local chapter members worldwide * 600+ events in 45 cities * 60k newsletter subscribers * 46k LinkedIn followers * 1M+ YouTube views * Nearly 400 podcast episodes * 7 virtual conferences with 50,000+ registrants Those numbers tell one part of the story. The better measure is what happened around them: weekly updates on the state of the field, podcast conversations with the people building the tools to disseminate best practices, events in cities around the world, reading groups, lunch and learns, conference talks, workshops, and more Slack threads than any sane person should try to count. What's harder to quantify is the number of connections, friendships, jobs, projects, and ideas that started here. WHY THE LINUX FOUNDATION FELT DIFFERENT As the community grew, more people reached out wanting to partner, merge, or join forces. Some conversations were interesting. Some were flattering. But most were missing what mattered most: a real commitment to keeping the community open, useful, and led by the people doing the work. That is why the Linux Foundation felt different. I had watched for years as LF helped open source projects build the governance, credibility, and neutral ground needed to last. For the MLOps Community, that mattered more than scale alone. I’d talked in the past with Jim Zemlin, the LF CEO, about the similarities between MLOps Community and LF - both focused on helping technical communities grow without losing what made them useful in the first place. Over time, the work happening across MLOps, agent infrastructure, open source tooling, and production AI systems was starting to converge. The questions our community had been asking for years - how do you deploy, evaluate, observe, govern, and improve AI systems in the real world? - were becoming central to the agentic AI conversation. At the beginning of this year, those threads came together. AAIF was looking for a user group that could help connect the foundation's technical work with people building agents and AI systems in the real world. That sounded a lot like MLOps Community. For years, this community has been where production-minded practitioners compare notes in public. As agentic AI started raising many of the same infrastructure, evaluation, governance, and reliability questions, the fit became obvious. The Agentic AI Foundation has already crossed 180 member organizations. That’s the fastest any Linux Foundation project has ever reached that milestone. Underneath the growth is real structure. A governing board, steering committees, and a technical committee, all staffed by people with decades of experience running governance, working groups, and user groups. I’m excited to announce the MLOps Community is now the official Agentic AI Foundation user group. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT The community continues. The meetups, live streams, newsletter, podcast, and practitioner-first conversations are not going away. What changes is the support behind it: more resources, broader reach, and a clearer path for what’s ahead. A new name and a new look are coming. But the thing that made this community worth joining - the many-to-many, practitioner-first, nobody’s-selling-you-anything culture - is not changing. If you have thoughts, questions, or extremely strong opinions about any of this, I genuinely want to hear them. My inbox is always open.* A FEW THANK-YOUS I am grateful to so many people who have taught me so much along the way. Too many to name here; however, I will try. * David Aponte - the first member to reach out and ask if I needed any help organizing stuff. We then went on to do 2 years of podcasts together. * Vishnu Rachakanda - you told me so many times, what got us here won’t get us there. I think I finally understand. * Gaetan Castelein - the first person to offer to pay for pizza at a meetup. * All of our incredible sponsors we have had over the years. Check here to see them all. * Paul Van der Boor - for encouraging me to lean into my weirdness. * Denny Lee - for supporting any crazy idea I brought him, and making me feel like true royalty by flying me out to a conference in SF for the first time. * Mihail Eric - for putting up with my bad jokes, and making me constantly laugh. * Rahul Parundekar - you stress tested any new piece of tech I came to you with and determined what is signal and what is noise. * The amazing local organizers in each city. You gave me an excuse to travel. Patrick, Hari, Stephen, Bauke, Morena, Jean, David, Alex, Gleb, Stefan, Marina, Sadik, Mario, Leo, Arthur, and so many more * Stephen Oladele and Nwoke for their help early on with writing the newsletter. * Adam Becker - your genuine curiosity constantly inspires me. * Sahar - for listening to my ramblings and keeping me on track. Oh yeah, and inspiring me to dream bigger. * Simba - for the surf, the coffee, and laughing about how we pronounce MCP. * Todd Underwood - you brought legitimacy to the community early on when I don’t think we even knew what was possible. * Diego Oppenheimer - Your advice has never steered me wrong. Except for in Amsterdam. * Leo Walker - For driving the lunch and learn sessions that have taught me so much. * Binoy - For driving the reading group sessions that have taught me so much. * Joe Reis - You help me keep my feet on the ground. * Nishi - You remind me what the challenges for builders are today. * Euro - For your dedication to uplifting the European AI ecosystem And entertaining all of my podcast talk * Lior - Always there to offer advice on how to grow. * Mark Freeman - I've learned so many mental frameworks from you. AND so many good memes. * Han, Burhan and Vlad - you are officially the meme GOATs. * Mederic - for never letting a Slack question go unanswered. * Lazlo - for never letting us lose our principles. * Willem Pienaar - every time I talk to you, it's like a master class. * Jeff Huber - for always letting me use your podcast studio. * Neal Lathia - for hosting all your OSS projects within the MLOps Community. * Chip - For being the most accomodating keynote and always willing to share your research with us. * Mike del Balso and Kevin Stumpf - for your early investment into the community when we were nothing. * Sam Partee - for helping me raise expectations of what is possible, and lower expectations of what I am capable of. * Luke Marsden - bet you didn’t think that your little idea would turn out like this? * Ilnardo - for running all those virtual engineering labs so we could get hands on. * Paco - anytime you give me a speaker reco I know its gonna be good. * And to the incredible core team Christina, Ijeoma, Charlie, Joselito, Toni, Marko, Marc, Diego, Steve, Menula, Marisa, and Nancy. Through and through, you showed your tenacity and grit to execute at a high capacity and quality. * David Mitchell - You harnessed my ideas and made them a reality, you put up with my rants, you kept me consistent and above all you showed me this isn’t rocket science. * Dan Baker - all those late night questions, all those wild ideas, I am amazed you stuck around for this long. — Demetrios