Accelerating Customer Success with Expanded Partnerships across the Kubernetes Ecosystem

In the rapidly evolving world of cloud-native development, a Kubernetes platform is only as strong as the ecosystem that supports it. We view a robust ecosystem of partner validated products as the essential engine for customer experience and their sustained success. 

While VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) delivers the secure, enterprise-grade private cloud, its full potential is unlocked through  VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) – a built-in CNCF-certified Kubernetes runtime.  

VKS delivers an immediate, cloud-native foundation that replaces fragmented point solutions with a single, cohesive infrastructure. By eliminating the complexity and hidden costs of siloed environments, VKS enables enterprises to deploy modern applications and AI workloads with the rigorous security, automated management, and massive scale of a true private cloud. It transforms standard infrastructure into a business-ready platform, allowing organizations to roll out a vast ecosystem of third-party apps with total confidence.

The Future is Collaborative: Advancing with our Partners

We are deepening our commitment to a mission of rapid innovation of VKS complemented partner ecosystem of products. By collaborating with industry leaders in the cloud-native space, we are providing our customers with a proven foundation to run their most critical workloads with confidence.

Today, at KubeCon Europe, we are excited to share new partner product validations with VKS. These organizations represent the leading edge of cloud-native networking, security and API management providing our customers with greater choice and flexibility-

F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services (CIS) acts as a bridge between Kubernetes environments like VKS and F5 BIG-IP hardware/ virtual appliances. It enables automated management of application services like traffic management, load balancing and security by translating container orchestrator events into BIG-IP configuration changes.

• Enterprise needs:
  Modern enterprises often struggle to maintain consistent, high-performance application delivery when moving to Kubernetes. Platform teams face the “complexity gap” of trying to bridge traditional, proven network services (like advanced load balancing and security) with the dynamic, fast-changing nature of containerized environments without manual, error-prone configurations.
  
• Why should customers care?
  F5 Big-IP CIS provides a Kubernetes-native control plane that integrates directly with VKS on VCF. By automatically watching Kubernetes resources and translating application intent into BIG-IP configurations, this validation delivers automated, production-grade L4–L7 services—including TLS offload and granular traffic control—ensuring that critical workloads remain secure and highly available at scale for VCF customers. 

To learn more about how VKS and F5 BIG-IP CIS work together, refer to the full Reference Architecture.

Kong Konnect is a unified API lifecycle management platform that delivers a high-performance runtime engine to govern traditional API, AI, and microservices traffic. Within a Kubernetes environment like VKS, Kong API Gateway (part of Kong Konnect) acts as an intelligent “control tower” translating external requests into secure and governed internal traffic with sub-millisecond latency while providing a single pane of glass for configuration, governance and deep analytics.

• Enterprise needs:
  Customers today face significant challenges as their Kubernetes environments scale. The proliferation of microservices, external integrations, and new AI workloads increases traffic volume and connectivity complexity, creating material risks to performance and availability. The core issue is a lack of end-to-end governance: as diverse workloads expand, unmanaged interactions make it difficult to apply consistent security and enforce global consumption policies.
  
• Why should customers care?
  Kong’s API gateway on VKS addresses these challenges by providing a unified, policy-driven platform for comprehensive connectivity. This architecture validates Kong as the standardized management and traffic governance layer for VKS helping organizations bridge the gap between traditional infrastructure and AI-native agility. It ensures that every request—from the physical host to the deepest AI workload—is secure, optimized, and controlled. This benefits customers by providing a centralized experience that reduces operational complexity and ensures consistent security across all runtimes.

To learn more about how VKS and Kong work together, refer to the full Reference Architecture.

Tigera’s Calico Enterprise gives platform engineering teams a single management plane to secure, observe, and troubleshoot all workload communication across every cluster in Kubernetes environments like VKS. Built on the most trusted open-source technologies, it extends native capabilities with enterprise-grade features including advanced network security controls and deep observability. 

• Enterprise needs:
  Infrastructure teams today often face fragmented configurations and manual, complex lifecycle management when scaling Kubernetes. Traditional perimeter security is ineffective for flat Kubernetes networks, leaving workloads vulnerable as customers often struggle to detect threats and meet compliance standards in containerized workloads.
  
• Why should customers care?
  With the official validation of Tigera Calico Enterprise with VKS, our goal is to make Kubernetes inherently more secure and compliant from the networking layer up for our customers. This integration addresses complex security needs by providing enhanced capabilities—such as Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), Web Application Firewall (WAF), compliance reporting, enhanced observability, and multi-cluster management—all within VKS. Customers benefit from unified visibility and seamless security controls across clusters without sacrificing agility.

To learn more about how VKS and Tigera work together, refer to this blog.

With VKS 3.6, we introduced a powerful new capability: VKS Networking Add-ons. With this framework, we are taking a major step forward in container networking- fundamentally opening up the VKS architecture by providing a native, pluggable and version managed mechanism to integrate customer- preferred CNI implementations. By unlocking this new level of extensibility, we are empowering enterprises with the flexibility to choose and deploy the exact networking architecture that best aligns with their operational needs.

Leveraging this framework and building on CNI offerings like Antrea and Calico that are included with VKS, we are excited to have Cilium – a widely adopted CNCF Graduated project, now enabled on VCF as well. Cilium delivers high-performance networking, advanced security, and comprehensive observability for container orchestration platforms primarily using eBPF technology. It enables highly efficient traffic routing, strict network policy enforcement, and robust security for Kubernetes workloads. Our ongoing collaboration with Cisco to validate Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium with VKS ensures a robust architectural foundation for our customers. Stay tuned for more updates on this in the coming months!

Platform teams no longer need to choose between the stability of enterprise infrastructure and the speed of Kubernetes. Together, these validated architectures enable a secure design where networking, security, and API management are natively aligned with the VCF platform.

It is important to also recognize that as a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, VKS is extensible to other third-party services that are CNCF conformant as well. By adhering to these CNCF interoperability standards, VKS enables organizations to easily build modern Kubernetes-based applications, while leveraging their preferred solutions from across the Kubernetes ecosystem. 

This community-aligned approach lets enterprises focus on innovation, powered by VCF’s robust infrastructure platform that is trusted by the world’s largest organizations.

Our Kubernetes Ecosystem Partners page showcases a broader set of partnerships and validations with solutions that are key to success for platform teams. With these, we’re not just building a platform; we’re building a powerhouse of collaborative innovation. 

Wrapping up

Modernizing infrastructure shouldn’t feel like solving a puzzle with missing pieces. By aligning with the broader cloud-native landscape, we ensure that our customers benefit from:

1. Streamlined Interoperability: By integrating with established industry standards, we eliminate the need for “custom glue code” through solutions that are pre-validated to work together.
   
2. Accelerated Innovation: By leveraging a mature, integrated stack, enterprises can spend less time on infrastructure management and more time shipping code that drives their business forward.

Our commitment to an open ecosystem is long-standing, building on existing successful validations with leaders across cloud infrastructure, app development and monitoring to deliver immediate, measurable value to our enterprise customers. 

These partnerships address the core challenges of modern application delivery—security, connectivity, and performance—by bringing enterprise-grade capabilities directly to VKS clusters on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

We are incredibly excited about what this means for the future of the VCF platform and, more importantly, for what  our customers are empowered to build and innovate.