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Building the Perfect Cloud-Native Platform for your Workloads


In an IT landscape where business leaders must manage countless applications and find ways to seamlessly deliver those apps to consumers, there is a need for a solution that allows any app to run anywhere. To that end, Gartner predicts that cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation of 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025.

Nutanix is the perfect platform for organizations with both cloud-native and legacy applications as well as organizations with diverse teams each using different Kubernetes platforms. The Nutanix platform offers a common control plane and a common infrastructure that can cater to all these different demands.

Key Takeaways:

  • For many businesses, the decision to shift to cloud-native practices is a necessity for ensuring that applications and data can run anywhere.
  • Building a platform that fully supports cloud-native requires a foundational infrastructure that can offer inbuilt data services for Kubernetes to the fullest.
  • Nutanix is a perfect cloud platform due to its ability to accommodate the consumer’s existing as well as modern app environments and leverage hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for future-proof application development.

Read on to learn about the process of building a platform with cloud-native practices in mind for each workload and how Nutanix presents a solution that stands apart from the competition.

What is a cloud-native platform?

An IT platform is the hardware or software location where applications and workloads execute. A cloud-native platform in particular utilizes modern software abstraction technologies to enable efficient build, deployment, and management of workloads in the cloud.

These future-proof platforms exist on architecture using containers and Kubernetes to build applications. Cloud-native applications themselves are packaged as containers and architected as collections of microservices.

Cloud-native development adheres to a DevOps approach and results in deployment across elastic cloud infrastructure. When the applications in question have their foundation in containerization and microservices, software development itself facilitates a higher level of coordination between developers and operators. The result is a streamlined, accelerated process that benefits IT teams and consumers alike.

The Nutanix cloud-native platform features a simple control plane that includes the ability to manage components from other vendors, such as VMware. In the Nutanix ecosystem, users can easily manage entire hybrid multicloud environments from a single interface without any exposure to the complex moving parts underneath.

Why build cloud-native platforms for each workload?

The most important reason to consider a shift to a cloud-native approach is the guarantee of flexibly running applications anywhere. Containerization allows applications to run at any location and in any cloud, as well as giving those applications the freedom to move between clouds in a hybrid multicloud environment.

Running cloud-native applications on the Nutanix platform standardizes the integration with  public clouds from various hyperscalars and service providers, and brings the reality of running applications and workloads anywhere to a point that is ideal for the end user. 

Nutanix layers a standardized infrastructure platform over every cloud and location such that the operator only needs to use a simple set of familiar tools to accomplish key tasks. It is not necessary to learn a proprietary method unique to each cloud vendor.

Cloud-native technologies also allow for the accelerated development of applications with robust software packaging, non-disruptive application upgrades, efficient scaling, and easy porting across multiple environments.

Mostcloud-native platforms today are built on some form of Kubernetes. Kubernetes as an infrastructure layer can be deployed on-premises or in the public cloud, providing a common operating model across environments.

What sets the perfect cloud-native platform apart?

The ideal cloud platform can meet the consumer wherever they are and accommodate their existing infrastructure. With Nutanix, the consumer has the choice of which Kubernetes distribution they want to use, whether that is a proprietary distribution or a different one altogether.

The cloud platform should also serve to extend the consumer’s existing platform. Organizations switching to a cloud-first mentality can still use their existing infrastructure by simply extending to the cloud with HCI-powered Kubernetes.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform as a solution that can accommodate the user’s other choices in cloud services such as AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Kubernetes provides an infrastructure layer that IT teams can operate at scale in a programmatic, repeatable fashion. On the right platform, this utilization of Kubernetes is not limited by the demands of complex distributed systems.

Finally, a perfect cloud-native platform stands apart from the rest through its ability to facilitate enterprise data services directly within cloud-native applications. More and more organizations are embracing the future of integrating data services into applications, but not many providers are yet capable of accommodating this demand.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), however, excels where VMware lacks in enabling a future-proof approach to cloud-native development.

Take a look at this customer success story to see how NCP uses Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and the power of HCI to help Valmark streamline IT operations and improve disaster recovery responsiveness.

Nutanix is the perfect cloud-native platform for your workloads

Large, small, and mid-sized businesses across the globe choose the Nutanix platform as a solution for enabling their cloud-native applications to run anywhere without resistance. VMware as a cloud provider does not provide a consistent way to manage workloads across different locations and environments.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is the foundation for a hybrid multicloud platform powered by flexible and secure HCI technology that delivers applications and workloads to any cloud. With Nutanix HCI as the base of the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack, users gain both efficiency and simplicity in their IT tasks.

Nutanix is the best cloud-native platform for virtual machines (VM) and Kubernetes. Rather than pick another big-name cloud provider, enterprises can choose Nutanix for a consolidated, simplified, unified solution that bridges the gaps in a multi-platform or multi-location environment.

Learn more about how companies can rethink cloud workloads and other ways to optimize applications in the cloud.

The Nutanix “how-to” info blog series is intended to educate and inform Nutanix users and anyone looking to expand their knowledge of cloud infrastructure and related topics. This series focuses on key topics, issues, and technologies around enterprise cloud, cloud security, infrastructure migration, virtualization, Kubernetes, etc. For information on specific Nutanix products and features, visit here.


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