VM replacement has gotten very real over the past couple of years. During KubeCon earlier this year we had a chat about this with Venkat Ramakrishnan, VP and GM for Portworx at Pure Storage. How are organizations responding to market disruptions in virtualization?
The days of tire-kicking Kubernetes and containers are firmly behind us. Today's enterprise customers are running tens of thousands of Kubernetes nodes in production environments. Some of them operate over 250,000 containers simultaneously. This shift coincides with significant pricing changes in the VMware ecosystem following Broadcom's acquisition. It creates what Ramakrishnan calls "a compelling event" that's accelerating containerization journeys.

Migrate or modernize?
Organizations need to decide: will they migrate to another VM-based platform or are they going to modernize with Kubernetes? Many are choosing the latter, Ramakrishnan tells us. They recognize that if retraining is necessary anyway, it makes more sense to invest in learning a platform representing the future of infrastructure. A platform like KubeVirt enables developers to run VMs and containers side-by-side on Kubernetes. This is important, as it provides a unified control plane that eliminates the need for separate teams with distinct skillsets.
That said, not all workloads will move to containers. Legacy applications with significant "code gravity" will continue running as VMs for the foreseeable future. Organizations need the tools and platforms to manage this hybrid reality effectively.
With proper planning and the right partners, replatforming is achievable for enterprises of all sizes. The idea is that this gives them the foundations to support innovation for decades to come while gaining the flexibility to operate across any cloud environment.

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