Your VMs Are the Load-Bearing Walls in Your Estate

Every year, KubeCon rolls around and the conversation turns, almost inevitably, to the future: a future in which containers have won, Kubernetes is the universal substrate, and virtual machines are relegated to a dwindling “traditional systems” precinct of the application landscape. I understand the appeal of the story. It is clean. It has vision. It is also, of course, untrue.

The majority of enterprise compute still runs on VMs. Not as a legacy embarrassment awaiting migration, but as the deliberate, still irreplaceable foundation of how the enterprise operates. Before I head to Amsterdam for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, I want to make that case.

Virtualization in Context

The most interesting infrastructure conversation happening right now is not “VMs vs. containers,” but how to manage both well together.

There is a persistent conflation in our industry of “old” (or “legacy,” “traditional,” etc.) and “ready to be replaced.” Virtual machines are certainly old, in the sense that they have been core infrastructure for decades. That’s because VMs deliver resource efficiency, strong security isolation, and service continuity in ways that containers do not replicate.

Containers share an OS kernel. That is a feature; it is precisely what makes them lightweight and fast. But it is also a foundational security issue that organizations in regulated industries and/or anyone running sensitive workloads cannot simply wave away. A…