Confidential computing is drawing fresh interest as enterprises weigh where their most sensitive AI workloads can safely run. That shift is giving virtual machines a new role alongside containers on Kubernetes, rather than a slow retirement.

The timing lines up with a milestone for KubeVirt, the open-source project that runs VMs inside Kubernetes clusters, which graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation this week. Its maintainers are now steering the project toward AI isolation, agent sandboxes and confidential computing, a long-standing technology that is regaining momentum, according to Itamar Holder (pictured, left), principal software engineer and KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat Inc.

“I think it’s one of the blockers for a lot of companies to join public cloud in general, like companies that really care about super sensitive data,” Holder said. “I think it unblocks them to join.”

Holder and Vladik Romanovsky (right), technical lead and KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how KubeVirt is evolving from a virtualization tool into an operating layer for AI workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

Confidential computing and the new case for VMs on Kubernetes

KubeVirt’s core idea is running VMs and containers on the same Kubernetes cluster without maintaining two separate stacks. That pairing matters more in the AI era, with Nvidia Corp. developers helping the project integrate dynamic resource allocation for GPU hardware, Holder noted. Romanovsky sees the two forms of compute as partners rather than rivals.

“VMs will do kind of the heavy lifting and larger isolation, and the pods that are running around them would provide a better scaling for cache applications,” Romanovsky said. “In general, it belongs together. VMs and containers can run as one application as well.”

The project is also eyeing a role in AI agent sandboxing, an area where Red Hat is building out infrastructure. The maintainers want KubeVirt to become another isolation backend for the Kubernetes agent sandbox repository, Holder explained.

“I think that we can offer a lot of benefits that other isolation backends don’t have,” Holder said. “We can use live migration and complex hardware configurations with DRA and a lot of other sweet stuff.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE