Introduction
As enterprises accelerate adoption of cloud native architectures and harness the power of AI, platform engineering teams find themselves struggling with operational complexity. For organizations scaling Kubernetes across datacenter, edge, and cloud, the real challenge isn't Kubernetes itself—it’s managing the vast ecosystem that surrounds it. Common challenges include:
- Day 2 operations: Keeping Kubernetes and all the associated fast changing ecosystem software up to date can take up significant time and energy.
- Bridging the divide between containers and VMs: Most enterprises still rely on VMs along with containers, but maintaining separate, siloed infrastructure for the two environments can be inefficient and expensive.
- Hardware supply chain constraints: Bare-metal Kubernetes can require a lot of resources at a time when hardware has become expensive—and increasingly difficult to procure—given global supply chain shortages.
- Delivering data services: Providing comparable storage, database, and data management capabilities everywhere you operate can be a real headache.
To overcome challenges like these, organizations of all sizes are adopting “full-stack” enterprise Kubernetes platforms that integrate software and hardware components and simplify management.
This blog explores these four challenges in more depth, explaining how Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), our full-stack Kubernetes solution, addresses each challenge. Our newly released The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Cloud Native Deployment looks at the challenges that enterprises face as they scale cloud native operations in more detail.
Streamline Day 2 Operations
Managing the underlying storage, networking, and security infrastructure needed for your cloud native environment can be a challenge. Platform teams also struggle with keeping Kubernetes and the growing ecosystem of add-on components tested, integrated, and up-to-date. Developers are forced to get involved with these tasks all too often, wasting valuable time that would be better spent writing code.
The Nutanix Difference
The Nutanix Kubernetes Platform solution addresses these common Day 2 challenges with:
- Simplified, full-stack deployments: NKP leverages proven Nutanix management capabilities, treating physical hardware as a fluid pool of resources and streamlining manual intervention, especially when you use Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for your on-premises deployments.
- Automated updates: With NKP, initiating a platform upgrade will update the cluster, the operating system, and all add-on components.
- Centralized management: By providing the same management and other tools across datacenter, edge, and cloud, NKP enables a single team to manage all of an organization’s cloud native deployments—helping to minimize redundancy and managing operational overhead.
Converge VM and Container Operations
Most enterprises will continue to run VMs for the foreseeable future, even as they aggressively expand container use. Many rely on mixed-mode applications where containers and VMs are both required, such as when a database runs in a VM while the app front-end runs in containers. But running VMs and containers in separate siloed environments tends to be both inefficient and expensive.
The Nutanix Difference
Nutanix addresses the increasingly-common need to support both containers and VMs, allowing them to share the same infrastructure and be managed by a single team:
- Unified management: Nutanix brings VM and container management under a single, unified control plane.
- Simplified networking: Flow Virtual Networking is designed to remove the network separation between VM and container environments, making both VMs and pods native citizens of a single Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for seamless connectivity and unified security.
Virtualize Kubernetes for Resource Efficiency
Deploying bare-metal Kubernetes can consume a massive amount of resources. On-premises bare-metal deployments require a lot of dedicated hardware. As an example, standing up dedicated Development, Test, Staging, and Production clusters on bare metal can require up to 22 physical servers or more. Given the current supply chain shortages for memory and GPUs, and the resulting increased costs, bare-metal deployments can be prohibitively expensive in situations where they aren’t absolutely necessary.
The Nutanix Difference
Nutanix alleviates supply chain pressures by supporting both bare-metal and virtualized Kubernetes deployments.
- Kubernetes on AHV: Virtualizing Kubernetes on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor allows you to efficiently use available hardware by consolidating control planes and worker nodes, delivering high performance for demanding workloads. This operational efficiency allows you to efficiently utilize hardware. With Nutanix, you can virtualize and manage containers without additional virtualization software licensing because AHV is included with the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure license.
- Kubernetes on bare metal: Nutanix Kubernetes Platform can be deployed on bare metal for demanding AI or data-intensive workloads requiring maximum performance and minimum latency.
Close the Data Services Gap
Enterprises running cloud native applications need access to the same robust data services across datacenter, edge, and cloud. However, it can be extremely difficult to provide the storage and database services on-premises that teams are accustomed to consuming instantly in the public cloud.
The Nutanix Difference
Nutanix closes the gap with built-in enterprise data services that are available everywhere—in the datacenter, at the edge, and in the cloud:
- Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS): High-performance block, file, and object storage.
- Nutanix Database Service (NDB): Automated Database-as-a-Service provisioning for easy access to SQL, NoSQL, and vector database instances.
- Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK): Container-native disaster recovery, snapshots, and replication.
Find out More
A full-stack Kubernetes platform is an essential foundation for modernizing legacy applications and accelerating container and AI adoption. Nutanix delivers full-stack cloud native solutions that address enterprise challenges, removing infrastructure complexity so developers can focus on innovation.
Download our The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Cloud Native Deployment today to take control of your cloud native journey and accelerate your path to AI.
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