Broadcom open-sources its Kubernetes VM manager

Broadcom Inc. has opened up its Kubernetes Virtual Machine (VM) manager as an open-source project, aiming to simplify operations across diverse enterprise computing environments. This project, known as the VM API, has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) Sandbox, serving as a starting point for early-stage cloud-native initiatives.

VM API offers a vendor-neutral framework for provisioning and managing virtual machines using the same APIs as Kubernetes, which orchestrates modular and portable software containers.

In addition, Broadcom announced plans to standardize application behavior across various Kubernetes distributions and expand support for third-party software on VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service. At KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, these announcements underscore the increasing necessity for infrastructure capable of handling traditional applications alongside modern containerized and AI workloads.

Despite Kubernetes being the leading platform for container orchestration, virtual machines continue to play a crucial role in enterprise computing, with VMs constituting 53% of production applications according to a recent Linux Foundation survey.

Broadcom's VM API project tackles the operational complexity of managing VMs and containers separately. By leveraging Kubernetes' declarative management model, it enables the creation and management of virtual machines across different infrastructure providers, while maintaining features like hardware isolation and specialized input/output performance.

Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom's chief marketing officer and vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions, emphasized the project's goal of providing consistent management across environments without necessitating organizations to abandon their existing virtualization investments.

Furthermore, Broadcom is addressing another interoperability issue by co-chairing a Workload Conformance Working Group to establish common expectations for application behavior across Kubernetes environments. While existing conformance programs verify that Kubernetes distributions support standard APIs, they do not ensure identical application behavior across platforms due to varying infrastructure capabilities, configurations, and operational practices.

This proposed workload conformance standard aims to help software vendors avoid the need to certify applications individually for each Kubernetes distribution and provide enterprises with greater assurance of application portability. Additionally, Broadcom has validated over 20 partner solutions for VKS, the Kubernetes runtime integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation, supporting areas such as observability, security, data management, AI, application delivery, networking, and storage.

These validations are designed to facilitate organizations' deployment of Kubernetes workloads using familiar third-party tools, minimizing the need for extensive integration or alterations to existing operational practices. Broadcom's VKS ecosystem now comprises more than 90 independent software vendors actively participating in testing and validation.