Beyond Microservices: Running VMs, WASM, and AI Workloads on Kubernetes (glt25)

Kubernetes has evolved far beyond its roots as an orchestration platform. Today, it's a powerful and flexible engine capable of managing a wide variety of workloads, from virtual machines to WebAssembly applications to AI inference models. In this talk, we'll explore how Kubernetes can be leveraged to run non-traditional workloads, tackling common challenges and showcasing cutting-edge solutions. We'll start by discussing KubeVirt, a technology that enables seamless migration of on-premise VMs into a Kubernetes environment, making it easier to consolidate infrastructure and modernize legacy systems. Next, we’ll dive into WebAssembly (WASM) workloads using SpinKube, highlighting WASM’s security, sandboxing, and near-instant startup times that make it ideal for lightweight cloud-native applications. Lastly, we’ll cover running AI models and inferences on Kubernetes with an emphasis on optimizing performance through proper cluster topology, hardware considerations like GPUs, and scalable configurations. Throughout the talk, I will showcase live demos of each workload type—VMs, WASM apps, and AI models—running on Kubernetes, providing practical examples and real-world use cases. Whether you're looking to expand Kubernetes usage in your projects or exploring new workloads to orchestrate, this session will offer valuable insights and hands-on solutions for diverse compute needs. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.linuxtage.at/glt25/talk/FVPWLT/