By Greenfield deployments are easy. Brownfield infrastructure is the real problem. Enterprises have no unified governance layer for existing VMware, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud workloads.
The Guest: Dirk Alshuth, CMO at emma
The Bottom Line
- emma’s Brownfield Onboarding enables automated discovery of existing infrastructure with selective resource visibility, bringing legacy estates under unified governance alongside new greenfield deployments without migration or disruption
***
Speaking with TFiR, Dirk Alshuth of emma announced brownfield onboarding capabilities at KubeCon Europe 2026, explaining how the automated discovery process brings existing infrastructure under centralized governance without requiring workload migration.
What Is Brownfield Onboarding?
emma announced brownfield onboarding capabilities to complement its existing greenfield deployment focus. The feature addresses enterprises running legacy VMware, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud infrastructure that cannot be easily migrated but requires governance alongside new deployments.
Dirk Alshuth: “Today we announced our brownfield onboarding capabilities. emma has traditionally served customers who have needs for greenfield deployments. But of course, there’s a lot of brownfield out there, and for us, that’s an important evolution. From today, we will be able to serve customers by enabling them to discover their brownfield estate, bring it under governance and visibility in emma without migrating workloads, and govern it alongside what’s coming next in their evolution.”
Alshuth clarified that brownfield refers to existing heritage infrastructure, while greenfield deployments include new sovereign cloud workloads, AI infrastructure on specialized providers, or hybrid environments. emma’s platform consolidates both under unified governance.
Broader Context
emma’s brownfield onboarding process uses automated account connection and selective resource discovery. Unlike all-or-nothing discovery tools, emma allows users to control which resources become visible in the governance dashboard, preventing exposure of sensitive or irrelevant infrastructure.
Dirk Alshuth: “The process is quite easy. It’s a discovery process. It involves connecting accounts to the emma platform, and it is an automated discovery process that is not all-in but selective. That means that the user, upon discovery, can still decide which resources need to be visible or which resources should not be visible. That’s part of the process. Based on that, the platform does its work, and you will see the results appear in the dashboard to govern.”
Alshuth positioned emma’s differentiation as the breadth of services available once brownfield infrastructure is onboarded—governance, cost optimization, and integration with emma’s multi-cloud networking backbone. This contrasts with competitors offering narrower capabilities across fewer cloud providers.
Dirk Alshuth: “One of the differentiators for us is that we are able to combine brownfield and greenfield into one dashboard under one platform. When you look at emma, it’s the variety and breadth of the services within emma. When you bring your brownfield into emma, you will be able to govern it and optimize costs. We can also connect it to our own multi-cloud networking backbone. That’s the breadth of the offering that emma brings to the table.”
emma’s cloud operations platform now supports unified governance for enterprises balancing legacy hyperscaler workloads with new sovereign cloud deployments in Europe, AI infrastructure on specialized GPU providers, and on-premises environments under centralized policy enforcement.
Watch the full TFiR interview with Dirk Alshuth here.
