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In the previous post in this series, we covered why Virtual Machine (VM) Live Migration in Kubernetes is difficult: a VM’s IP is its identity, and the “new” VM on the destination node has to come up with the same IP, this something that Kubernetes is not known for, and on top of that, traffic has to switch over only after network security policies are in place.

Kubernetes is built for containers, and it’s been doing that since it used to run docker as an engine for its containers. But what if you want to add VMs to the mix? After all, containers are ephemeral and don’t require fixed IPs as they shift the identity toward labels, but VMs on the other hand are tied to IP addresses and in some cases MAC addresses. This brings us to this blog about VM migration and IP preservation.

There’s a question we hear constantly from platform and engineering leaders right now, “which agent SDK should we standardize on for our Kubernetes clusters?” The honest answer is that the question is slightly wrong, and the rest of this post explains why. But it’s a fair question, so let’s compare the contenders first.