Nutanix Announces Nutanix Kubernetes® Platform to Remove Cloud Native Complexity to Speed Innovation Across the Enterprise
By Aaron Delp and Patrick Campbell
Today at Nutanix .NEXT, we are announcing the Nutanix Kubernetes® Platform (NKP) solution. NKP combines the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) features with our recent acquisition of the D2iQ product family to bring a consolidated runtime, orchestration, and management environment to our cloud native customers. NKP continues to build upon a rich history of valuable Nutanix cloud native products and integrations.
Before NKP, third-party tools – often a chaotic mashup of open-source – were a recurring nightmare for IT administrators and security teams. In most cases, this nightmare a result of application modernization efforts spread across several teams that do not coordinate with each other. IT administrators and security teams were stuck with endless tracking and potential contention with anyone responsible for application development.
NKP helps to quell the contention and frenzy that invariably hampers the success of these teams by validating interoperability and support to help achieve greater business value from any modern application delivery initiative and keeping track of all the essential utilities that most developers use. Platform engineers and IT admins can use NKP to keep all cloud native resources up-to-date with upgrades, patching, maintenance, and security.
NKP attacks and simplifies the main pain point of Kubernetes usage today: Complexity. NKP provides simplified Kubernetes operations, seamless application mobility, and integrated security and compliance.
NKP is a complete, enterprise-grade, production-ready platform based on Kubernetes that serves modern applications. By taking the best of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem, but providing it in an integrated and lifecycle-managed package, NKP delivers all of the functionality necessary in production with a dramatically lowered TCO.
Giving Customers Greater Freedom of Choice
Nutanix has always been focused on providing customer choice, and it shows again here with our support for multiple distributions of Kubernetes (K8s), including the OpenShift, Rancher, and Amazon EKS solutions, and others. NKE was also introduced natively so that customers have a choice with any CNCF-compliant K8s distribution. However, as cloud native workloads and containerized applications evolved, the need for standardization on a modern application delivery platform has become more important for many enterprises.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a perfect example of this and Nutanix has been a certified partner for several years. To give customers even greater freedom of choice, Nutanix acquired the intellectual property and resources of D2iQ, Inc.
Nutanix Cloud Native Stack
My team and I are excited to join Nutanix, and we bring more than a decade of experience supporting some of the most mission critical cloud native deployments in the world. NKP is a complete and open Kubernetes platform that enables customers to take full advantage of the innovation in the CNCF ecosystem, and together with our rich data services enables every Nutanix customer to run and manage any application, anywhere.
Over the past several months, the main functionality of the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) has been merged into NKP as a Nutanix native platform for new containerized workloads on Nutanix infrastructure. Customers can still bring their own K8s solutions and complementary resources to the platform and run Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
One More Thing: Application-Aware Data Services
While NKP provides many benefits to operations, application mobility and integrated security, an often overlooked area of platform services for cloud native applications is enterprise-class data services for persistent apps.The new Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) solution completes a cloud native stack and complements NKP.
NDK simplifies and unifies business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) for cloud native applications by extending enterprise data services to containerized applications. For developers, NDK speeds time to value and reduces operational risk by introducing a cloud operating model.
For business owners, NDK increases cost efficiency and simplifies the delivery of resilient infrastructure. NDK works with NKP to extend platform services to cloud native data services and provide a seamless operations and support experience.
Next Steps
NKP builds upon mature Kubernetes management technologies proven at scale by D2iQ’s Kubernetes Platform, which was acquired by Nutanix in 2023. NKP is expected to be available in the Summer of 2024. For more information, please see our Nutanix Kubernetes Platform page.
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