Nutanix Launches Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service for the Multicloud Era

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced Karbon Platform Services, a Kubernetes-based multicloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with automated system-managed security, to accelerate the development and deployment of microservices-based apps across any cloud. This offering provides software developers with a turnkey managed services experience, on-premises, in the public cloud, and at the edge, to build and run cloud native applications while enabling them to decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure. It also provides IT operations teams with a simplified and consistent application lifecycle management and security framework. This announcement marks a significant milestone for Nutanix as it looks to expand offerings aimed at accelerating enterprises’ cloud native journeys. 

Enterprises, with their sights set on realising the benefits of digital initiatives, often struggle to unleash the full potential of their software developers and the agile DevOps processes by which they need to operate. Kubernetes, along with its ecosystem of cloud native technologies, continues to rapidly evolve, making it increasingly difficult to implement without extensive technical resources. Furthermore, organisations need to be able to leverage both on-premises and public cloud-based Kubernetes deployments without compromising their ability to manage data, applications, and IT resources simply and effectively.

“IT resources are the engines that power digital enterprises. But as a company scales, adopts hybrid cloud, and manages an increasing number of applications, supporting engineering needs can be challenging for IT,” said Rajiv Mirani, CTO at Nutanix. “With Karbon Platform Services, we aim to simplify application development and orchestration while streamlining the relationship between IT and development teams to support our customers’ DevOps strategies.”

This new cloud native PaaS will help software engineers to streamline application development and orchestration without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. Karbon Platform Services builds on the core Kubernetes lifecycle management capabilities initially introduced with Karbon as an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software. This new offering brings automated, system-managed security and multi-tenancy  to run a wide range of microservices-based applications across multiple cloud infrastructures. 

“We were looking for a single PaaS platform that could host our Reflex and Vision Insights on both the edge and in our private cloud, to take advantage of both a distributed architecture as well as support software development and machine training on the public cloud,” said Damien Pasquinelli, CTO at Hardis Group. “Karbon Platform Services delivers the richness of services we need in a PaaS solution, along with the simplicity and ease of management Nutanix is known for — across clouds. Implementing Karbon Platform Services has allowed our Vision Insights development and DevOps teams to go from zero to prototype in less than a quarter of the time it previously took. This software running on Karbon Platform Services is already in production for customers like Schneider Electric, a leading global specialist in energy management and automation."

Key benefits of Karbon Platform Services include:

• Rich Managed Services: This PaaS offering enables rapid development and deployment of applications ranging from simple stateful containerised applications to complex web-scale applications by leveraging simple, open abstraction of rich services. Specifically, Karbon Platform Services include  managed Kubernetes (K8s-aaS), Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS), serverless Functions, AI, message bus, ingress, service mesh, observability, and security services.
• SaaS-based Multicloud Operations: Ops teams benefit from simplified operations and uniform application, data, and security lifecycle management, regardless of the underlying cloud, at scale leveraging the SaaS-based infrastructure lifecycle manager. Developers benefit from the rich platform services to write applications once and deploy in the cloud through the SaaS-based application lifecycle manager.
• Extensible Hybrid PaaS: Karbon Platform Services provides cross-cloud data mobility and hybrid application management through transparent, WAN-optimised data pipelines and extensible data interfaces. This feature gives enterprises the flexibility to bring their own services and leverage the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Enhanced Security Posture: With Karbon Platform Services, IT operations teams can leverage a consistent security and API model with unified observability for data and applications across cloud. It provides automated, system-managed security with built-in multi-tenancy and role-based access control (RBAC) for the rich services.

“The complexities of Kubernetes and multicloud infrastructure management can not only overwhelm IT operations teams, but also limit the resources and tooling available to modern application software developers . With Karbon Platform Services, Nutanix abstracts infrastructure complexity and delivers a managed Kubernetes, containers, and a host of essential developer services in an easy, readily-consumable PaaS environment,” said Bob Laliberte, Practice Director & Senior Analyst at ESG Research. “And given that 70% of customers we’ve recently surveyed1 prefer the combination of public cloud and private datacentre for containerised applications, Karbon Platform Services satisfies that desire for flexibility with its global control plane and simple multicloud management capabilities.”

In addition to Karbon Platform Services, Nutanix today also announced Xi Calm, a hosted version of its application management and orchestration solution to support DevOps teams, which is under development. 

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[1] Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Trends in Modern Application Environments, December 2019