vSphere Kubernetes Service for Platform Engineers – What You Didn’t Know with VMware by Broadcom

This session will highlight the robust capabilities of VKS for platform engineers, focusing on deep technical insights and real-world value. Discover how VKS offers a fully conformant Kubernetes runtime, simplified lifecycle management with 2-click cluster deployment, and built-in guardrails to ensure stability. We’ll address common pain points and demonstrate how VKS directly solves them, leading to faster development cycles and reduced operational overhead.

The VMware by Broadcom presentation at Tech Field Day at KubeCon North America 2025 focused on vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) within the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) framework. VKS delivers fully conformant, certified Kubernetes in a user’s data center, ensuring that applications running in other clouds can seamlessly operate on VKS. VCF acts as a cloud within the data center, offering services such as virtual machines, containers, and Kubernetes to end users. The presentation highlighted the role of the cloud administrator in enabling platform engineers to deliver Kubernetes through VKS.

VKS integrates deeply with the VCF infrastructure, managing dependencies for Kubernetes cluster upgrades and offering seamless integration with GPU, storage, and compute resources. VMware emphasizes the rapid delivery of vSphere Kubernetes Releases (VKRs), aiming to release new versions within two months of the upstream Kubernetes community’s releases. The speaker addressed a question about the “service” designation in VKS, clarifying that it refers to a Kubernetes service running on a broader cloud platform with capabilities such as network isolation, object storage, and managed databases. VKS supports multi-cluster management, allowing users to manage and lifecycle their Kubernetes clusters, introspect workloads, manage security policies, and protect data via Valero.

The presentation clearly distinguished VKS and VCF from Tanzu, explaining that Tanzu is a developer-focused platform for delivering code to production, potentially running on top of VCF but not included by default. In a demo, it was highlighted how VKS clusters could be deployed quickly by users via a self-service portal that leveraged upstream Cluster API, and that every aspect of Kubernetes cluster infrastructure could be customized and versioned for declarative management via tools like ArgoCD. The presenter emphasized that VCF delivers these services in a consumable fashion for end users, transforming the traditional virtualization platform into a self-service cloud.