Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Tina Nolte, vice president of product, for Kubernetes management service Spectro Cloud, about why we shouldn’t think of containers/Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Nolte recently wrote a popular post for us on why we shouldn’t think of containers and Kubernetes as just another form of virtualization — that it opens up a whole new way to think about application development and deployment. So we wanted to find out more about this concept.

“Kubernetes is really about that middle area between infrastructure and application. So the applications themselves are enabled to be differently architected because of that operational PaaS layer if you will,” she explained. “It’s not just a lift-and-shift of old apps into new infrastructure.”

Focusing too much on the infrastructure side of Kubernetes ultimately misses its true value, an insight Nolte gleaned, in part, from working for a well-regarded OpenStack-based start-up, Nebula, that ultimately shuttered.