Project Beacon

Project Beacon is a multi-year effort by Nutanix to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)-level services available natively anywhere – including on Nutanix and on hyperscaler infrastructure. With a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere.

This includes delivering these PaaS data services as fully managed services – meaning Nutanix, not the customer, is responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and securing the services – running on the customer’s choice of Nutanix Cloud Platform, Amazon EC2, and/or Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines.

The vast majority of organizations plan to leverage two or more IT infrastructure environments – including on-premises, in public cloud or at the edge – over the next one to three years. The emergence of containers and Kubernetes® has made moving applications between these infrastructure environments relatively easy. But, the PaaS services that so many developers rely on to build and ship code faster are tied to specific public clouds. This leads to high switching costs when looking to move applications to a more suitable environment, whether it’s due to cost, compliance, latency or other factors. Project Beacon aims to change that.

“Project Beacon is our vision for enabling developers to write applications once and run them anywhere by delivering data-centric PaaS-level services that are no longer tied to a single infrastructure provider,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President & CEO at Nutanix. “We hope to enable enterprises to fully embrace the benefits of hybrid multicloud, not only at the infrastructure layer but also at the application data layer.”

With Project Beacon, Nutanix aims to deliver these critical data-centric platform services with a single API and console, integrated with Kubernetes® container orchestration, and consistent management across environments. The services would be characterized by a consistent and simplified management experience, automated mobility, portable licensing, developer self-service, with built-in security and governance for cloud operations teams. As a result, developers would have access to a suite of data-centric PaaS services whether in hyperscaler infrastructure, on-premises or at the edge. At the same time, operations teams would be able to remain in full control of data governance, compliance and data protection.

“As the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat® OpenShift™ helps customers build, deploy and manage any application, anywhere,” said Matt Hicks, President and Chief Executive Officer, Red Hat. “With Project Beacon, Nutanix will build on our mission with a vision of data-centric platform services delivered consistently, anywhere, further extending customer choice on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platforms with Nutanix’s advanced data services.”

Nutanix is starting with database services, the foundation of all apps. As part of this effort, the company aims to extend the benefits of Nutanix Database Service™ (NDB) as a managed service in the public cloud. This will build on the NDB database automation and developer self-service experience already available on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), as a managed service on hyperscaler infrastructure.

Nutanix would then expand from there to the most popular data-centric platform services, such as streaming, caching and search. The goal of this effort is to deliver all key elements needed to build modern applications as a managed service so that developers would not have to rely on solutions that lock them into a single infrastructure.

“Organizations have come to rely on public cloud services to accelerate the speed of development and innovation, but there are trade-offs – in terms of complexity, cost, lock-in, and more,” said Dave Pearson, IDC RVP for Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies. “With Project Beacon, Nutanix aims to reduce lock-in and increase application development simplicity through unified management, automated mobility and the ability to write applications once and deploy them as needed on appropriate infrastructure.”

Project Beacon represents a bold, new chapter for Nutanix and we are excited to take this journey with our current and future customers. Sign up here to get updates on Project Beacon and participate in the beta process as we roll out new capabilities and services over the coming months and years.

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Read the Project Beacon launch blog to learn more.


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