Broadcom Open-Sources Its Kubernetes VM Manager to CNCF, Leads New Conformance Initiative
Broadcom contributed its VM API project to the CNCF Sandbox and co-chairs a working group to standardize application behavior across Kubernetes distributions.
U.S.-based semiconductor and infrastructure software company Broadcom Inc. has announced that it is contributing its Virtual Machine Application Programming Interface (VM API) project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The project has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, an entry point for early-stage cloud-native projects, aiming to simplify operations across diverse enterprise computing environments.
The VM API provides a vendor-neutral framework for provisioning and managing virtual machines using the same APIs that Kubernetes employs to orchestrate modular and portable software containers. Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom’s Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Marketing for Cloud Platform, Infrastructure and Solutions, stated that the goal is to make virtual machines "first-class citizens" of a Kubernetes environment without sacrificing capabilities such as hardware isolation and specialized input/output performance.
In addition to the open-source contribution, Broadcom is co-chairing a newly established Workload Conformance Working Group. This group aims to develop common expectations for how applications operate across different Kubernetes distributions. Existing conformance programs verify that distributions support standard APIs, but do not guarantee identical application behavior due to differences in infrastructure capabilities, configuration, and operational practices. "Just because two Kubernetes environments are conformant doesn’t necessarily mean that the application will behave consistently across both," Shenoy said.
A Linux Foundation survey of 492 practitioners, scheduled for release, found that VMs account for 53% of production applications, with most respondents expecting this proportion to remain stable. Among organizations expanding their VM deployments, 34% cited AI and agentic workloads as contributing factors. These moves reflect the growing need for infrastructure that can support traditional applications alongside modern containerized and artificial intelligence workloads.