Hello from KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City! There is a distinct energy when this community gathers, and it reminds us why we do this work. The cloud-native movement has never been about a single platform or vendor. It is about choice, interoperability, and the collective innovation that happens when open standards bring people together.
Scaling Kubernetes from day-one provisioning to day-two operations requires more than a reliable runtime—platform engineering teams need a flexible stack that removes friction by integrating with the tools they already trust. Listening to what our customers care about most, we committed earlier this year to expanding our collaboration across the cloud-native landscape.
Today, we are pleased to announce the latest wave of partners from across the Kubernetes ecosystem who have validated their respective solutions to run on the VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) component of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), adding to the extensive existing catalog of such solutions that customers use. The cloud-native community has shown tremendous momentum in embracing VKS, with ISVs actively partnering with us to ensure their solutions work smoothly with our CNCF-certified runtime. For our customers, this means less time troubleshooting integrations and a smoother path to production.
These solutions span the critical layers of the cloud-native stack, from observability and security to data management, application delivery and AI. Each partner integration has been driven by a simple principle: customers should be free to build with the tools they choose, without compromising on the operational consistency that enterprise environments demand. Rather than restricting teams to a closed toolchain, VKS integrates with established solutions across the Kubernetes ecosystem, helping protect their existing investments while enabling resilient, customized platform architectures.
Observability
Building on existing validations like Cribl, WatchTower and DX OpenExplore, full-stack visibility and telemetry solutions are being validated so platform teams can continuously monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their VKS workloads without altering established workflows.
Newly validated solutions: Cisco Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Labs, New Relic
Security, Compliance & Secrets Management
Complementing established partners like Aqua Security, Nirmata, Palo Alto Networks, Snyk, and Symantec SiteMinder, our ongoing ISV collaborations expand validations for security, threat detection, and secrets management tools to support zero-trust policies across VKS environments.
Newly validated solutions: CrowdStrike Falcon Platform, HashiCorp Vault, Sysdig Secure, Tigera Lynx, Wiz
Networking, Ingress & Service Mesh
Joining enterprise networking solutions like F5, Tigera Calico Enterprise, Kong and MuleSoft, our newly validated traffic management tools deliver reliable, multi-cluster connectivity.
Newly validated solutions: Netscaler ADC (Citrix), Solo.io (agentgateway, kagent, Solo Enterprise for Istio), Traefik Labs
Data Protection, Backup & Storage
Scalable storage and backup integrations are critical for enterprise-grade data protection. Building on established partnerships with NetApp, Cohesity, Portworx by Everpure, and Veeam, our ongoing ISV collaborations expand validations across VKS environments to ensure resilient stateful workloads.
Newly validated solutions: Commvault, Dell Technologies PowerProtect Data Manager, HPE Alletra, Scality RING
AI, Machine Learning & Advanced Analytics
Alongside established AI and data platforms like ClearML, NVIDIA, TrueFoundry, and Vectara, expanded ISV validations on VKS allow customers to deploy data-intensive and real-time processing workloads with confidence at scale.
Newly validated solutions: Charmed Apache Spark, H2O AI Cloud, SAS Viya
Application Delivery, Databases & Developer Platforms
Streamlining developer velocity and lifecycle management is essential for modern platform teams. Joining established partners like Appian, Azure Arc, BMC Helix, Canonical, Harness, Infosys, Redis, Testkube, and TIBCO, our latest validations add new GitOps, database provisioning, and application framework capabilities to VKS.
Newly validated solutions: Akuity Argo CD Enterprise and Kargo, KubeDB by AppsCode, Coherent Spark, Siemens Mendix
Why this matters
The value of these validations extends beyond simple compatibility checkmarks. For platform engineering teams, this means avoiding integration risk and significantly lowering operational overhead.
When teams can select observability, security, and data tools from a pre-validated catalog, they spend less time building custom integrations and more time delivering value to their developers. This translates directly into faster deployment cycles, lower total cost of ownership, and a platform that scales with the organization rather than against it.
Supporting Workload Conformance for Customers and ISVs
To take this a step further and reduce friction for our partners, Broadcom is also co-chairing the new Kubernetes Workload Conformance Working Group to build a unified, community-driven standard for workload runtime behavior. This upstream initiative will provide ISVs and platform teams with a shared framework to ensure application portability, security, and resilience across any conformant Kubernetes environment. By eliminating redundant validation efforts, this working group will empower ISVs to validate an application just once, confident it will run consistently and reliably on any conformant platform. For our customers, this standardized approach translates directly to faster access to a wider ecosystem of trusted tools, all with guaranteed reliability right out of the box. Watch this space as the Working Group begins meeting and charting a path forward.
Wrapping Up
Modernizing infrastructure shouldn’t feel like solving a puzzle with missing pieces. Because VKS adheres to CNCF standards, these integrations lower operational overhead and protect existing investments without building a walled garden.
Our commitment to an open ecosystem is long-standing, and this announcement is a continuation of that work, not a conclusion. Our Kubernetes Ecosystem Partners page showcases the current set of validated solutions, a list we will continue to expand as we deepen our collaborative role within the broader community.
If you are at KubeCon North America this week, stop by our booth (#129) and talk with our team. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how these validated integrations can support your platform goals. For our complete presence at the event, check out this blog.
Let’s keep building, together.
We are excited to share insights from some of our partners who are already driving impact with us:
“Charmed Apache Spark on VKS, provides simplified Day-2 operations with automated lifecycle management, monitoring, and security patching. Our collaboration enables data engineers to focus on analytics and machine learning rather than infrastructure.” – Cedric Gegout, VP of Product Management, Canonical
“Fortanix, powered by Confidential Computing, lets enterprises scale AI securely on VMware VKS with compliance built in.” — Sander Temme, Sr. Dir of Product Management, Fortanix.
“H2O AI Cloud on VKS lets enterprises run AI where their data lives, on the VMware infrastructure they already trust.” – Tom Stenger, VP of Partnerships, H2O.ai
“Enterprises running critical workloads on VKS can’t afford blind spots. With New Relic now validated on VKS, teams get unified cluster observability, find root causes faster, and tie operational performance directly to business impact.” — Varun Verma, GVP of Engineering, New Relic
“With Sysdig, users get runtime threat detection and posture security for enterprise VMware VKS workloads.” – Zaher Hulays, VP of Technology Alliances at Sysdig
“Traefik Hub in VCF provides a unified entry point to seamlessly migrate VMs to KubeVMs, scale VKS container workloads, and deploy governed AI agents across their VCF environment.”— Sudeep Goswami, CEO, Traefik Labs
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