Out of curiosity why did you decide to deploy your application as a VM image? Is there a reason you didn't go with a Helm chart or other container native deployment?
That's like polar opposites of stability and bleeding edge.
I will argue that there is less maintenance when handling virtual machines images, because it uses less bandwidth and need less tooling around it comparing with container image based infrastructure.
But in general both are nothing more than the golden image concept.
As a sysadmin i have never heard of this and es tun 800 VMs.