The “Golden Ticket” for Cloud-Native Modernization
For years, the case for ripping out a legacy hypervisor was mostly philosophical — the migration cost almost always outweighed the upside. Market consolidation and aggressive licensing changes have flipped that math. Enterprises now have a narrow window where the financial pain of staying on legacy virtualization is finally bigger than the engineering pain of moving to a cloud-native stack, and many of them are using that window to modernize the rest of their infrastructure at the same time.
Alan Shimel, broadcasting from SUSECON in Prague, sits down with Peter Smails, GM of Cloud Native at SUSE, and Manuel Sammeth, Managing Director at FIS ASP, to dig into what that shift looks like in practice. Smails frames it as a “golden ticket” moment, while Sammeth brings a hands-on view of moving large SAP estates off VMware without taking the rest of the business offline along the way.
They get into the realities of running mission-critical workloads on Kubernetes-based virtualization — storage and networking parity, day-two operations, and the trade-offs between lift-and-shift VMs and re-platforming onto containers. Sammeth’s team is doing both at once: migrating SAP workloads while standing up new AI healthcare services on the same cloud-native foundation, which puts a hard test on portability and operational consistency.
The bigger takeaway for cloud-native teams is that the stack is finally being asked to do what its proponents have always promised: host the legacy estate, the new microservices and the AI workloads on a single open foundation. Smails and Sammeth argue that the organizations treating this as one consolidated modernization effort, rather than three separate projects, are the ones coming out with a cleaner architecture on the other side.
