Why You Should Run Nutanix Kubernetes Platform on Nutanix Cloud Clusters

The Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) platform is a cost-effective solution for managing virtualized workloads in the cloud. It also provides the quickest way to move to the cloud without the need to refactor applications. NC2 can help with applications that run in virtual machines (VMs), but it can help equally well with containerized apps running in Kubernetes, thanks to the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution, which runs both on-premises and on NC2. 

NKP is a robust solution for deploying and managing Kubernetes® clusters across various environments, including on-premises environments, edge locations, and public clouds. A common question that comes up is: Why should I run NKP on NC2? 

In this blog, I’ll highlight some of the unique advantages of combining NC2 with NKP, and how this combination can streamline your Kubernetes operations.

A Cost-Effective Solution

If you’re already running NC2 and have available capacity, integrating NKP is a no-brainer. NC2 is an efficient option that allows current VMs high availability.  

Kubernetes clusters, by default, only support 110 pods per node. As you scale, you risk wasting resources with larger nodes. While it’s possible to change the maximum supported number of pods per node, this requires advanced expertise to ensure it will work in production. And changing the pod limit may affect retro-compatibility and the running of other open-source projects.

NC2 can help provide consistent high performance with the local NVMe/SSD storage on NC2 bare-metal nodes. If your containerized applications require many persistent volumes with guaranteed throughput and IOPS, you’ll have to pay more to your hyperscaler, and those costs are going to add up. Plus, your worker nodes are going to get the same performance benefits running your pods. This also reduces configuration for your containerized applications as NC2 can share the aggregate performance of the NC2 cluster versus siloing it off between cloud-based volumes. 

Nutanix storage also offers enterprise-grade capabilities like compression and erasure encoding which make the bare-metal cost even more cost effective. Nutanix also has thin provisioning, which is not always included in cloud offerings. Thin provisioning is beneficial in oversizing a persistent volume, which would be harder to grow later when already tied to an application, thus saving staff time in overall management.  

Kubernetes is very chatty over the network. If you use managed Kubernetes services in the cloud, the management and worker nodes are spread out across availability zones. The result is that you will end up paying for the data transferred between the management and worker nodes, as well as the traffic between your cluster and other cloud services or external endpoints. If your Kubernetes application is talking to resources on the NC2 cluster, there will be no additional charges since everything will be in the same availability zone. If your application stack requires a high-performance database running on NC2 being managed by the Nutanix Database Service (NDB) solution, then talking to containerized applications keeps data in the same availability zone to limit these cross-traffic costs.

Moreover, observability for your Kubernetes environment often comes with an additional cost in the cloud, with customers paying for extra services and storage. While this isn’t directly an NC2 benefit, NKP comes with observability and over 23 other Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects to help manage your Kubernetes clusters and applications. This makes upgrades simpler, and the strong support of Nutanix ensures you benefit from a top-tier customer experience— as demonstrated by Nutanix having  one of the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores in the industry (10-Year Average score of 90).

Mobility: Freedom to Move Across Environments

Nutanix is known for its flexibility, offering customers the freedom to run apps and data on-premises, at the edge, and in the public cloud. Being able to move from different hardware vendors, hypervisors and hyperscalers gives Nutanix customers peace of mind. Mobility is also important when it comes to data protection, disaster recovery (DR), or when running Kubernetes at the edge. At some point, you may want a second copy of data at a different site for availability or DR purposes, which gives you options to take advantage of cloud services or processing not available at the edge.

At the heart of data mobility is the Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) solution. NDK helps to manage the data services for applications running on Kubernetes clusters. NDK is designed to work specifically with containerized workloads, allowing you to configure custom resources for copy data management, data protection, and DR tasks.

NDK can take a snapshot that includes all of the application configurations, such as the definitions of Kubernetes resources like statefulSets, Services, ConfigMaps, and Secrets. This snapshot allows you to restore your application to a different site easily, ensuring true mobility. Unlike cloud-native block storage, which requires third-party tools or higher recovery time objectives (RTO) for replication, NDK simplifies the process without adding additional overhead.

If you’re using cloud-native files services, the Nutanix Files Storage solution  can offer impressive results in MLPerf Storage v1.0 benchmark suite, which measures storage performance for machine learning workloads.

Operational Consistency Across On-Premises and Cloud

For organizations using Nutanix and NKP on-premises, operational consistency is a major advantage. Rather than creating separate cloud teams with different tools and processes, teams can use the same technologies and operational model across both on-premises and cloud environments. This consistency reduces duplication effort and ensures that your teams can move seamlessly between the “cloud” and “on-prem” without needing to relearn different workflows.

The ability to move apps and workloads across environments—without changing your operating model or retraining your team—is a significant benefit for many organizations. This is one of the key reasons why companies using NC2 with NKP have seen such success.

NKP on NC2: A Future-Proof Solution

By running NKP on NC2, you gain a future-proof environment for all your applications, VMs and containers. 

If you’re looking to dive deeper into NKP on NC2, head over to the Nutanix Community and ask any questions you might have. Additionally, don’t miss Nutanix .NEXT, from May 7th to May 9th in Washington, D.C., where you can learn more about Nutanix solutions in person.

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