At Nutanix .NEXT 2025, I had the chance to sit down with Tobi Knaup, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix. As someone stepping into a Nutanix event for the first time, I was eager to understand what's happening on the container and cloud front from one of the company's key technology leaders. What emerged from our conversation paints a picture of a company deliberately positioning itself at the intersection of traditional virtualization and cloud native computing.

The Platform for the Next Decade

When I asked Knaup about the key takeaways from his side of the business, he didn't jump straight into product features. Instead, he stepped back to paint the bigger picture.

"I would start with our really long-term vision because I think every IT executive right now is thinking about two axes," Knaup explained. "One is: Where do I run? Do I go cloud? Do I go on-prem? And I think most organizations have moved from 'cloud first' or 'cloud only' to 'cloud smart,' which means some workloads make sense on the cloud, but other workloads maybe make more sense on-prem, and they're often more cost effective."

The second axis, according to Knaup, involves how you run your applications. "Most large enterprises have a very large state of virtual machines, but they're also now adopting containers. New applications that are getting developed are going into containers-in particular, AI applications."

This dual reality forms the backdrop for Nutanix's strategic positioning. Their goal is simple yet ambitious: provide a single platform that works across both axes-running anywhere (on-prem or in any cloud) and supporting both VMs and containers.

"We call it the platform for the next 10 years," Knaup noted, "because those are really the considerations organizations have to make: Where do I run and what do I run? Having a single platform that can do all of that means a customer doesn't need to decide right now how many VMs and containers they need."

Cloud Native AOS: Breaking Storage Free from Hypervisors

The most technical announcement coming from Knaup's team is Cloud Native AOS-essentially Nutanix's core storage platform running in containers on Kubernetes. This might sound abstract, but it represents a major architectural shift.

"What Cloud Native AOS does is essentially you can run that AOS storage piece without requiring the hypervisor," Knaup explained. To make this concept more concrete, he offered a simplified explanation: "In the VM-based world, you have one physical machine, and then all the different components of the system run in VMs. So for AOS, for example, the storage element is delivered through something called a CVM (Controller VM). This is now oversimplifying it, but essentially what we did is taking the CVM and putting it in a container."

The implications are significant. By freeing their storage technology from hypervisor dependencies, Nutanix can now deploy their storage capabilities in more places-including directly on Kubernetes in public clouds or on bare metal servers.

When I asked about availability, Knaup confirmed that while some customers are already testing it, general availability is planned for this summer.

Kubernetes Strategy: It's All About Choice

Beyond Cloud Native AOS, Nutanix's broader container strategy centers around NKP (Nutanix Kubernetes Platform) and NDK (Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes).

For container storage, Knaup emphasized the importance of standards and flexibility: "In the Kubernetes world, there is an open source industry standard storage interface. It's called CSI-Container Storage Interface. That's a standard that every storage vendor has adopted, including us."

This standards-based approach gives customers freedom of choice-a theme Knaup returned to repeatedly. "Because customer choice is so important to us, our customers can choose what storage system they want to use. We don't force people to use Nutanix storage when they run our Kubernetes platform. They can use Pure Storage, they can use Dell, or they can use what the public clouds provide."

NDK serves as a bridge between Kubernetes and storage administration, addressing a key pain point for platform teams. "Kubernetes administrators like to live within the Kubernetes API," Knaup noted. "They don't want to talk to a storage admin to configure replication or snapshotting or disaster recovery strategies. What we did with NDK is create a bridge between our Kubernetes platform and our core storage platform."

Cloud Expansion and Strategic Partnerships

Nutanix is also expanding its cloud presence with NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) now available on Google Cloud, adding to existing support for AWS and Azure. This allows customers to run the same Nutanix infrastructure across on-prem and the three major public clouds.

Another notable partnership announced at the event is with Canonical, bringing official Ubuntu Pro support to NKP. "Ubuntu is the most popular Linux flavor for AI workloads and on the public clouds," Knaup explained. "We did a partnership to offer Ubuntu Pro, which is the supported version of Canonical's Linux. It gets frequent security upgrades, it's more secure. We are now offering that as a built-in option for NKP."

This integration is available in the higher-tier NKP Pro and Ultimate editions, making it easier for customers to deploy supported Ubuntu environments without separate contracts with Canonical.

VMs vs. Containers: The Long View

Perhaps the most insightful part of our conversation centered on Knaup's perspective on the future relationship between VMs and containers.

"For us, it's really about supporting customers where they're at," Knaup said.

He went on to say that they see a spectrum. They see folks that go all in on containers, so they have a migration plan to move things to containers, but for your typical customer, they're happy with their VMs, and they'd rather spend their efforts on building new, differentiated applications and putting those in containers right out of the gate.

This pragmatic view recognizes the reality in most enterprises: "Almost all new development that we're seeing is going straight to containers. Moving existing applications like your monolithic enterprise applications from a VM to a container isn't necessarily that much of a value add, and so people are more focused on 'let's not change a working system.'"

Does this mean VMs are going away? Not according to Knaup: "I do think the VMs will be around for all of our lifetimes, and much beyond that, just like mainframes are still around. Why didn't those things move to VMs?"

That said, the direction of travel is clear: "I think over the next decade, definitely containers as a percentage of enterprise workloads are going to rise significantly. Also because there's one analyst who said something like 'hundreds of millions of new applications will be built over the next however many years,' and they're basically all going in containers. So containers are going to overtake things at some point, but for at least the next decade, every enterprise is going to do both."

He also highlighted a fundamental tension: "A key difference between containers and VMs is that VMs are pets and containers are cattle. Putting a VM in a container where Kubernetes treats everything as cattle-there's some impedance mismatch."

Knaup sees skills gaps as the biggest hurdle to container adoption: "The number one reason why cloud native projects fail today is because customers don't always have the right skills. Today, most organizations, the percentage of containers that they're running versus VMs, it's pretty small-maybe five to ten percent-and they have a skills gap around that."

Moving Forward in a Post-Broadcom World

As our conversation wrapped up, I couldn't help asking about the elephant in the room: how Nutanix is responding to customer concerns following Broadcom's VMware acquisition.

Knaup acknowledged the opportunity: "The price increases that Broadcom has driven are massive in some cases. So that is a consideration and a reason why we're having really good conversations with productive customers that are looking for alternatives."

But he emphasized that risk mitigation is an even bigger factor: "People don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. We're having conversations where people just want to have two vendors to minimize risk, so they're starting with some workloads on Nutanix, maybe they're keeping others on VMware/Broadcom."

For customers worried that Nutanix might someday make similar moves, Knaup pointed to their migration tool: "What protects customers against us maybe doing a similar move in the future is we have a tool called Move. That's actually what we use to migrate customers away from VMware and onto our platform, but the tool can also help customers migrate the other way. We really take customer choice seriously and don't want to lock in customers in that way either."

With its dual support for both VM and container workloads, cloud and on-premises deployments, and now hypervisor-free storage options, Nutanix is making a compelling case to be that flexible platform that gives customers freedom to evolve on their own terms-a stark contrast to the more prescriptive approach coming from some other vendors.

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