Running virtual machines natively in Kubernetes has long been a balancing act, as container and VM philosophies butt up against each other. And sometimes the simple act of creating a new VM that includes a variety of different features can feel unnecessarily cumbersome.

Enter: The InstanceTypes and Preferences API, to effectively simplify this process. These provide abstractions for resource sizing, performance and OS support, allowing users to focus on parameters relevant to their applications.

We initially introduced v1beta1 of this API in KubeVirt v1.0.0. During the last months we have learned and improved a lot, making it all available now in Kubevirt v1.2.0.

In this talk we will introduce you to the basics of InstanceTypes and Preferences and how you can use them to make life easier. For more tech-savvy, we will look at the latest developments of the API and what has happened since the v1.0.0 release of KubeVirt. Finally, we will present our future plans and the roadmap to stable v1 of the API.