By Jonathan Anthony
Publication Date: 2026-11-12 02:27:00
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…
