Last Thursday in Almaty (Kazakhstan), a room packed with engineers spent three hours migrating VMs off VMware. Not watching a demo. Actually doing it.

Timur Tukaev aka @tym83 led the workshop: convert OVA to QCOW2, push images to S3, and boot VMs on Cozystack. Then came the ultimate time-sink: untangling the networking assumptions VMware had quietly baked into those machines over the years. Throw in PostgreSQL and Kafka, wire them together, and keep tweaking the Java app until it finally came alive.

Later that day, Timur took the stage again to talk about the future of Kubernetes. Short version: the exciting work has shifted from the cluster itself to what's being built on top of it. The full talk is going up on the Cloud Native Kazakhstan YouTube channel, alongside sessions on hiding the control plane, Kubescape, cross-account Istio on AWS, and a case study on swapping Ceph for Longhorn.

Attendees get to keep their Cozystack tenant for 30 days. No overnight resets — this is a real setup to stress-test properly. Plus, it doubles as a stepping stone toward Cozystack administrator certification.

Next up: Bishkek (Aug 17), Tashkent (Aug 20), and Astana (Aug 24). Europe in October, the US in November, and a global online session in early September.

Links and details here: aenix.io/workshops/vmware-to-cozystack

One final takeaway: the migration is the easy part. The real bottleneck is that vCenter and Veeam live in people's fingers, not in the docs. It’s 15 years of muscle memory. Nobody budgets time for unlearning — and that’s exactly what kills a pilot.

P.S. Huge thanks to the organizers, the team at QOSI (Qazaq Open Source Initiative) and everyone who came out! Appreciate the invite, your trust, and the incredible vibes.

P.P.S. A massive shout-out to Ivan Okhotnikov aka @xor_dev — a rockstar engineer on the Ænix team and an all-around awesome human. Thanks for helping pre-bake the workshop code, pulling those all-nighters, and providing real-time tech support (Google Meets and all) for our attendees while the workshop was live.