Building and running modern applications at scale starts with choosing the right container platform. This decision shapes how quickly you can deliver new services, optimize infrastructure, and maintain operational consistency as environments grow. While ease of operations, developer experience, scalability and cost are often top of mind, equally important – and often overlooked – factors such as faster access to new New CNCF-Conformant Kubernetes versions, standard support duration, flexibility to run multiple Kubernetes versions on same host and treating VMs and Containers as first-class citizen in a platform ultimately determine how successful your Kubernetes platform strategy will be.
Here are five often-missed factors to consider when selecting your container platform.
1. Faster access to new Kubernetes versions for faster innovation
Kubernetes evolves rapidly – with three major CNCF releases each year, each bringing critical enhancements in scalability, security, and extensibility. Staying current isn’t just about compliance; it’s about staying competitive. Organizations driving modern and AI-powered applications can’t afford to wait months for platform support – innovation now depends on how fast you can access and adopt the latest Kubernetes features.
Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) ensures rapid access to new CNCF-conformant releases – typically within about 2 months of upstream availability, on par with major public cloud providers. This means enterprises can quickly take advantage of new capabilities, API improvements, and performance optimizations as they emerge and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. However other platforms take up to 7 months to access the latest Kubernetes version.
2. Duration of standard support for Kubernetes versions - longer is better
Fast updates matter – but so does how long each release stays supported. The CNCF provides support for each Kubernetes version for about 14 months. Most public cloud providers extend this lifecycle to roughly 24–26 months, but split it into 10–14 months of standard support and an additional 10–12 months of extended support at an extra cost of a few thousand dollars per cluster per year. Some legacy vendors offer only standard support of 6 months and additional restrictions for odd vs even versions for paid extended support.
vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) under VMware Cloud Foundation delivers the longest standard support window – 24 months – at no additional cost vs industry norm of about a year. This gives platform teams the flexibility to align upgrades with business priorities, not vendor timelines. The extended lifecycle includes community updates, critical bug fixes, and security patches – without the premium fees or forced upgrade cycles common elsewhere. The result: fewer disruptions, better planning, and lower total cost of ownership.
3. Flexibility to run multiple Kubernetes versions on the same hosts
Bare metal environments typically support only one Kubernetes version per host. This leads to more hardware, wasteful resource utilization, additional costs of managing more hosts, inefficient capacity planning and more. Over time, this “one-dedicated-host per Kubernetes version” approach drives up infrastructure and operational costs and inefficiency, requiring additional hardware to maintain performance and compliance boundaries.
With vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), organizations gain true flexibility to run multiple Kubernetes versions side-by-side on the same host as containers run in VMs. This architecture, featuring multiple, mixed size Kubernetes clusters, leads to greater resource utilization, reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and simpler capacity planning.
4. What's included in distribution matters - it may just ease your pain
Typically a Kubernetes environment comprises many open source tools like Prometheus for observability, Pinniped for identity services and Istio for service mesh. Keeping these tools up to date is as important as managing the lifecycle of your platform to get the most out of your Kubernetes deployment.
VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) includes many open source projects as part of their Core and Standard distribution for simplifying lives of platform teams.
Open-source projects such as Antrea, Pinniped, and Calico are distributed as part of the broader Core package. These tools are pre-installed, pre-enabled, and lifecycle-managed, automatically delivered and upgraded with the Kubernetes cluster, ensuring consistency and compatibility. This approach significantly reduces the operational burden on platform teams.
Other notable CNCF-certified open-source software projects like Prometheus, Harbor, Contour, and Istio are available in the Standard package. Administrators can readily opt-in to consume and upgrade these tools according to their specific business and operational requirements.
5. Kubernetes and Virtual Machines both treated as first-class citizens by platform
While the majority of traditional applications rely on virtual machines, legacy Kubernetes platforms often treat VMs as bolt-on extensions–second-class citizens loosely integrated and managed as an afterthought with sub-optimal and limited features, scalability and tools. This approach leads to inefficiency, operational friction and fragmented automation.
It is critical for organizations to treat both virtual machines (VMs) and containers as first-class citizens. VM management and capabilities are not as mature or scalable in legacy kubernetes centric platforms. Additionally these legacy Kubernetes platforms lack maturity.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers a best-of-breed unified platform that treats both containers and VMs as first-class citizens. VCF is a mature and feature-rich platform that provides a "single pane of glass" experience, crucial for reducing operational complexity and eliminating the need for separate management teams and skill sets to separately manage VMs and containers.
Leading hyperscalers also, that host billions of VM and container workloads for thousands of customers, successfully treat VMs and containers as first-class citizens, providing unified management and operations.
Conclusion
What may have seemed like a minor detail before – has become a critical decision point today. It’s time to take a closer look – and choose a platform built for what’s next, not what was.
