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Consulting Solutions Architect DevOps & Virtualization Western Europe
Johannes Wagner is a Consulting Solutions Architect with over two decades of experience navigating the shifting tides of IT infrastructure. Having spent the first half of his career focused on classical datacenters, enterprise storage, and traditional virtualization, he embraced the container revolution early on. Today, he focuses on datacenter modernization, cloud-native storage, and Kubernetes architectures. Currently at NetApp, Johannes helps engineering teams across Europe architect resilient, large-scale data platforms for modern workloads. He is passionate about bridging the gap between traditional infrastructure and cloud-native design, focusing on open standards and real-world engineering over marketing hype.
For years, cloud-native engineers could treat infrastructure as a given. Whether it was an on-prem VMware cluster or a hyperscaler, the foundation was just there. Over the last two years, this has changed. Commercial shifts in the hypervisor market and increasing demands for data sovereignty are actively forcing companies to evaluate alternatives.
Many organizations look for a simple 1:1 replacement for their legacy VMs, which often leads to frustration. However, those who view this as an opportunity for application modernization frequently turn to KubeVirt. This shift turns Kubernetes into the unified "operating system" for both legacy VMs and modern containers and lays the groundwork for AI platforms.
If you are working in the cloud-native space, this shift will likely affect your clusters soon.
In this session, I will share my experience from guiding various customers through these virtualization migrations. My goal is to help you understand what happens when traditional infrastructure teams meet cloud-native principles. We will discuss three common challenges I see in the field: the cultural shift (moving from vCenter ClickOps to GitOps), the infrastructure reality (the complexities of managing bare metal), and the data challenge(why traditional storage, backup, and DR concepts often break in Kubernetes).
Finally, I will offer an honest look at where KubeVirt is a strong fit, and just as importantly, where it is not, so you can proactively help your organization navigate this transition.
