Nutanix Project Beacon Illuminates Cloud-Native Navigation
Decoupled distribution delivers. That’s the message emanating from the cloud-native community as enterprise technology vendors now seek to enable application mobility across clouds.
Why do we need to move our apps across the cloud landscape to such a degree? Because the hyperscalers populating the Cloud Services Provider (CSP) layer offer a variety of service, price and functionality options. Organizations typically need a mixed selection pack at any given time. Plus, they need to mix clouds to comply with local data governance regulations depending on world region and so on.
By decoupling, we’re decoupling applications (and their data) from the underlying infrastructure so that they can run in any cloud, or to put it in more practical terms, so that they can run on a multi-cloud backbone. Think of it like car on a freeway with the option to use any lane, including the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) track and hard shoulder emergency lane in some instances. By distributing, we enable an organization’s IT department to run each application in the place that is best suited for it. By delivering deployment for developers building modern applications across clouds, software engineers use Kubernetes-based technologies to orchestrate, secure and manage the whole universe here being created.
Data-Centric PaaS
The senior vice president of product management at Nutanix is Thomas Cornely. A year ago, his company announced Project Beacon and shared a vision for decoupling applications and their data from the underlying infrastructure. Cornely detailed new updates to this effort, which are intended to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere. According to the company’s Enterprise Cloud Index study, 75% of IT teams expect to use more than one IT infrastructure 一 including on-premises private cloud, public cloud or ‘edge’ Internet of Things cloud services in the next one to three years.
“Developers building new applications need fast, easy access to resources and services on reliable, scalable infrastructure. These include both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) data services such as blocks, files and objects, as well as more advanced Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) data services such as databases, streaming, caching and increasingly AI inference endpoint services,” noted Cornely in a Nutanix technical blog.“ While the majority of cloud-native applications are born in a cloud, very few are actually multi-cloud and built to be moved easily from one cloud to another, or on-premises. They also lack consistent data services to store, protect and process data, across clouds.”
The challenge with existing cloud native storage services — as with platform data services — is that they are native to just one particular public cloud, said Cornely. This means, for example, developers and operators who want to migrate a deployed application that was built on AWS (and relies on Amazon’s native storage services) to another public cloud or a private cloud will need to find an alternative storage solution and rewrite the application logic. This creates application and data silos, slows down development and time to market and creates operational complexity.
Finally, for an application to be easily portable between clouds and on-premises, it falls to Kubernetes Platform Engineering teams to deliver consistent Kubernetes platforms with these data services across all these environments, and do so in a way that is secure, complies with enterprise policies and ideally remains manageable over time, added Cornely.
Cloud-Native Data Services
For infrastructure data services, Nutanix is expanding the scope of Project Beacon to include cloud-native block and file storage services that can be consistently managed natively in public clouds, in on-premises private data centers and at the edge. These cloud-native data services will integrate seamlessly with the modern orchestration environments used in public clouds, facilitating easier management, strengthening digital resilience and enabling better compliance with evolving regulations.
Cornely and team say that this will give platform teams and developers building and running modern applications seamless, fast and secure access to the same powerful data and storage services no matter where they choose to deploy. This will reduce operational complexity, managing just one data service in multiple environments, rather than different teams managing different data services in each environment.
These are some of the challenges Project Beacon aims to address, building on the company’s experience breaking down silos, building tools that simplify operations across complex environments and delivering high-performance, web-scale data solutions.
Photo by Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash
