Confidential computing and AI agents power KubeVirt VMs

Confidential computing is generating new interest as companies weigh where their most sensitive AI workloads can safely run. This shift will give virtual machines a new role alongside containers on Kubernetes, rather than slowly retiring them.

The schedule aligns with a milestone for KubeVirt, the open source project that runs VMs in Kubernetes clusters and graduated this week from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. According to Itamar Holder (pictured left), senior software engineer and KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat Inc., the project’s maintainers are now steering the project toward AI isolation, agent sandboxes and confidential computing, a longstanding technology that is gaining momentum again.

“I think it’s one of the barriers for a lot of companies in general to join the public cloud, for example companies that really care about very sensitive data,” Holder said. “I think it gives them an opportunity to join.”

Holder and Vladik Romanovsky (right), technical lead and KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat, spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight of theCUBE Research at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how KubeVirt is evolving from a virtualization tool to an operations layer for AI workloads. (*Disclosure below.)

Confidential computing and the new case for VMs on Kubernetes

The core idea of ​​KubeVirt is to run VMs and containers on the same Kubernetes cluster without managing two separate stacks. This pairing is more important in the AI ​​age, as developers from Nvidia Corp. will help the project incorporate dynamic resource allocation for GPU hardware, Holder noted. Romanovsky sees the two forms of data processing as partners rather than rivals.

“VMs will do some of the heavy lifting and allow for greater isolation, and the pods running around them would allow for better scaling for cache applications,” Romanovsky said. “In general, it goes together. VMs and containers can also run as one application.”

The project is also considering a role in AI agent sandboxing, an area where Red Hat is building its infrastructure. Maintainers want KubeVirt to become another isolation backend for the Kubernetes agent sandbox repository, Holder explained.

“I think we can provide a lot of benefits that other isolation backends don’t have,” Holder said. “We can do live migration and complex hardware configurations with DRA and lots of other great things.”

Here’s the full video interview, part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(*Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content of theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE