“Just rewrite it”: What platform teams really think about modernization

Mergers, acquisitions, and the steady churn of business and technology initiatives are creating something nobody asked for: Duplicate infrastructure and expertise. 

Here’s the typical split: A platform engineering team that owns cloud-native and Kubernetes workloads. Meanwhile, traditional IT holds the keys to virtual machine (VM) workloads. Two teams. Two domains. One budget. And the costs keep going up.

Even organizations that talk about standardizing on Kubernetes still have a substantial VM footprint. For many teams, this coexistence isn’t a temporary transition state. It’s the operating model.

On-premises, this split forces two separate environments. Each environment includes networking, servers, and storage. Such duplication can be structurally less cost-efficient than consolidation. VM-based mission-critical workloads aren’t going away anytime soon.

It’s not like teams don’t want to modernize. They absolutely do. But it’s not as simple as just picking between old-school VMs or diving into Kubernetes. What’s really happened is these two worlds have grown up on their own.

That kind of split often leads to extra infrastructure, more people doing the same jobs, slower projects, mixed-up governance, and budgets that keep ballooning. And when you’re on-prem or working at the edge, running two separate setups for networking, compute, storage, and playbooks just doesn’t make sense anymore.

To make matters worse, “just…