GEC NEWS WIREWe announced Project Beacon a year ago to share our vision for decoupling applications and their data from the underlying infrastructure to truly enable application mobility across clouds. As we shared this vision with customers over the last year, we saw an opportunity to expand the scope of the project to benefit the developers building Kubernetes-based modern applications across clouds and the operators tasked with deploying, securing and managing these Kubernetes environments.
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.
The challenge with existing cloud native storage services一just like with platform data services一is that they are native to just one particular public cloud. This means, for example, developers and operators who want to deploy an 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.
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.
Expanding Project Beacon
The recently announced Nutanix Kubernetes Platform will on day one delivers a unified management plane for CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distribution, including cloud-native Kubernetes services such as EKS, and AKS. With a single pane of glass, Platform Engineers will be able to consistently deploy, secure, manage and operate large fleets of Kubernetes clusters, across on-premise and public clouds.
For infrastructure data services, we are 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.
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.
Introducing new Cloud Native Data Services
As a key step in this journey, we are developing Cloud Native AOS, which will take our proven and resilient AOS stack and deliver it in a containerized platform. The first use case available will be Nutanix Data Services (NDK) powered by Cloud Native AOS, which brings enterprise-grade data protection and data management capabilities to cloud native apps starting with AWS EKS with a vision to expand across any hyperscaler and K8s environment.
A critical target use case for Cloud Native AOS is building cloud native applications that can simply maintain data access in the face of availability zone failures, full region or even cloud failures. This level of resilience has traditionally required fully re-architecting applications to have the application itself manage data replication between availability zones and regions.
