Why a Provider-Neutral VM API Matters for Kubernetes
Broadcom has contributed VM API, an open-source project designed to manage virtual machines through Kubernetes APIs, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox. Building on the work of VM Operator, the project aims to establish a provider-neutral approach to VM lifecycle management, enabling infrastructure and platform teams to manage virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers through familiar Kubernetes APIs and declarative workflows.
What VM API Does
VM API lets VMs be provisioned and managed through Kubernetes APIs, so they participate in the same declarative infrastructure model already used for containerized workloads.
The project originated as VM Operator and will evolve into a provider-neutral Kubernetes API for virtualized infrastructure. Its architecture is designed to separate common VM lifecycle operations, such as provisioning, resizing, and deletion, from infrastructure-specific implementations. This approach aims to enable infrastructure providers to support a common Kubernetes-native API while preserving their underlying platform capabilities.
That is valuable to platform admins who manage mixed estates of containers and VMs.
Why Broadcom Is Contributing VM API
Today, organizations often run VMs and containers side by side, but managing them can require different tools, APIs, and workflows depending on the underlying infrastructure. Moving VM API into CNCF stewardship is intended to create a community-driven API and operating model for VMs that multiple infrastructure providers can implement, widening who participates in how VM lifecycle management evolves. Transitioning the project to CNCF is meant to let the API specification evolve through broad industry participation across diverse deployment models and use cases. Acceptance into the Sandbox is a milestone toward community-led development and vendor-neutral governance.
VM API’s acceptance into the CNCF Sandbox establishes a foundation for broader community participation and open development. As the project evolves, contributors from across the ecosystem will have opportunities to help shape its APIs, implementation, and future direction.
The Value to the Kubernetes and Platform Engineering Community
For platform engineers building internal platforms, a vendor-neutral VM API provides greater flexibility. Specifications developed in open, multi-stakeholder governance are more likely to gain support across tooling and infrastructure providers, which lowers the switching and integration cost for teams standardizing VM operations on Kubernetes.
The timing lines up with how VMs are actually used today. A Linux Foundation survey of 492 practitioners, conducted in September 2026 and sponsored by Broadcom and CNCF, found that VMs remain a majority workload: the average organization runs 53% of production applications as VMs, and 51% run half or more. Only 10% of organizations run no production VMs, and 23% run 90% or more, indicating that most environments operate a mix rather than standardizing on one workload type.
The same survey points to convergence between VM and container operations: 61% of respondents describe their VM and container teams as collaborative or fully integrated, and 8% already run VMs on Kubernetes using KubeVirt. AI and agentic workloads are adding to VM demand, cited by 34% of organizations expanding their VM footprint as a growth driver, alongside rising planned adoption of MicroVM sandboxing (20% to 30%) and confidential computing (12% to 26%) as isolation measures for AI workloads.
These findings highlight an evolving infrastructure landscape in which virtual machines and containers continue to coexist, platform teams are increasingly collaborating across traditional operational boundaries, and emerging AI workloads introduce new requirements for isolation and flexibility.
VM API represents an opportunity to address these challenges through open collaboration. By bringing the project into the CNCF Sandbox, Broadcom aims to help establish a common Kubernetes-native approach to VM management that can evolve through broader industry participation, reduce fragmentation, and support diverse infrastructure environments.
