Russell East's blog

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I’m a Principal Systems Architect with a background in distributed systems, cloud-native engineering, and large-scale software architecture. I’m currently exploring how AI-native systems change the way we think about orchestration, runtime behaviour, observability, and stateful execution in production environments. This blog is a place to document ideas, experiments, and architectural observations around AI systems, platform engineering, distributed runtimes, and modern software architecture.

Category: Runtime architecture

  • The Return of Orchestration in AI-Native Systems

    Introduction For the last decade, cloud-native architecture has optimised for stateless execution: ephemeral compute, horizontal elasticity, and infrastructure abstraction. That model remains highly effective for APIs, event handlers, and short-lived workloads. But AI-native systems, especially agentic and long-running ones, this introduces a different set of runtime demands: continuity, memory, supervision, and durable coordination. Stateless systems…

  • Why AI Systems Are Fundamentally Runtime Problems

    We are moving from a world where ‘Software is a Document’ (Code) to a world where ‘Software is a Process’ (Inference). In this new world, the compiler isn’t our last line of defense—the runtime is. TL;DR: The Infrastructure Shift Introduction Today, most of the current AI discussions focus on models: But once AI systems move…