The Stack Overflow Podcast Containers are easy—moving your legacy system off your VM is not
Dec 26, 2025
Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, discusses the intersection of legacy systems and modern technologies. He highlights the relevance of virtual machines in enterprise environments and explores how AI can help modernize old codebases. The conversation dives into why VMs should coexist with Kubernetes, the challenges of networking between them, and the organizational biases driving infrastructure decisions. Dan also shares insights on moving workloads back on-premises and the advantages of Nutanix's integrated platform.
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Episode notes
Containers Accelerate Innovation
- Containers let developers ship smaller increments and release far more frequently.
- That faster cadence is the core reason organizations adopt containers for innovation.
VMs Aren't Going Away Soon
- Millions of VM-based applications will remain because rewrites are slow and often unnecessary.
- Enterprises maintain VMs to keep legacy systems running and to integrate new containerized services.
Bank Keeps Mainframes And VMs
- Dan visited a large US bank that runs tens of thousands of applications in VMs.
- The bank has no plan to eliminate mainframes or VMs from their data centers.