KubeVirt’s graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) marks a turning point in a debate that once pitted containers against virtual machines. A decade on, Kubernetes is becoming one platform for legacy VMs, cloud-native apps and AI.

Enterprises still run much of their IT on VMs, even as AI pushes them toward new infrastructure. Red Hat Inc. is betting they won’t have to choose, with OpenShift 5 managing containers, VMs and AI workloads in one environment. Running two separate systems was never the goal, according to Fabian Deutsch (pictured), director of engineering for OpenShift Virtualization and Modernization and a KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat.

“But you’ve also got VMs, right, where you’re running applications in the old way that we did for decades before. And do you really want to maintain these two systems?” Deutsch said. “So our vision was, how can we unite those worlds to eventually make it easier to have one paradigm to run both, all these compute workloads on one platform.”

Deutsch spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed KubeVirt’s graduation, running VMs and containers on one Kubernetes platform, AI’s influence on virtualization and what comes next for the project. (* Disclosure below.)

KubeVirt and the case for one control plane

Kubernetes has drawn open-source projects and commercial providers onto a common platform, and AI’s hunger for compute has deepened that pull. Much of KubeVirt’s recent innovation now comes from the AI side, Deutsch explained.

“You don’t want to repave your data center just because you’ve got a new workload that you need to address,” Deutsch said. “So you’re having that flexibility to run it in the way that you need it.”

The CNCF announced the graduation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, seven years after accepting the project into its sandbox. Next on the list is passing GPUs, CPUs and memory into VMs, while AI is changing how the community values virtualization itself, Deutsch noted.

“There’s a lot of influx of features due to AI, by the way,” Deutsch said. “The isolation model, we didn’t get to it in the beginning, but the isolation of virtualization is helping, right, in the AI age as well.”

The project already runs on edge devices and in the cloud because it offers a consistent API across those footprints, according to Deutsch. Nvidia Corp. was an early adopter, and Microsoft Corp. is now stepping up, he noted.

“I think it’s about getting the right and next generation infrastructure into your house,” Deutsch said. “KubeVirt allows you to carry forward what you’ve got, what you invested in over the past decades, and not to leave it alone because you have to carry it forward.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(* Disclosure: The Linux Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE