This post was authored by Amit Jain and Sean Roth, Nutanix

Our new Kubernetes-based PaaS enables you to easily build, deploy, and manage your most innovative applications on any cloud

Though every organization’s cloud native journey plays out differently, the end goal remains the same: capitalize on the substantial gains in business agility and scalability that containers, Kubernetes, and the growing ecosystem of cloud technologies yields. Enterprises want to move faster, but the great challenge lies in putting the right frameworks, tools, and technologies in place in order to be able to go fast. Furthermore, all of those solutions (Kubernetes, especially) take a lot of time and effort to master and operate properly.

Simplifying Kubernetes lifecycle management to adequately serve developers’ resource needs is just the beginning of what cloud native organizations need to accomplish. Even with a managed solution in place to keep Kubernetes from getting in developers’ way, we know that much more is needed to better enable them and maximize their productivity.

Today’s microservices-based applications leverage all sorts of compute and data services-- many of which take time to properly operationalize. And, given the distributed nature of these applications, development teams are burdened with cobbling together the necessary stack of data, observability, connectivity, and security services. Developers also want to develop their apps with services, without having to deal with the underlying infrastructure.

Adding to the complexity of deploying and managing cloud native applications is the simple fact that the typical organization’s Kubernetes footprint often includes on-prem and cloud resources. In fact, according to a recent survey by ESG Research 1], 70% of respondents prefer the combination of public cloud and private datacenter for containerized applications. On top of that, many organizations simply don’t want the burden of managing Kubernetes and opt instead to run their applications on various public clouds.

Multicloud Kubernetes is standard practice today, but without the right tools in place, applications can’t be managed in a unified fashion with any consistent user experience.

Solving the challenges of equipping developers to swiftly deliver innovative cloud native applications and enabling those applications to be built, deployed, and managed on any cloud-- private, public, or edge-- is what drove us to build Karbon Platform Services.

We’re thrilled to announce that it’s available today!

Karbon Platform Services: An Overview

Karbon Platform Services (KPS) is Nutanix’s Kubernetes-based Platform-as-a-Service, built for the multicloud era. It offers developers simple, open abstractions of rich services to accelerate development and deployment of applications, ranging from basic stateful, containerized applications to complex web-scale applications. It also features a global SaaS control plane for multicloud management and offers system-wide security.

KPS is designed to accelerate application development cycles.

Using its intuitive interface, developers can help themselves to a broad range of readily available services including:

• Kubernetes applications (Containers-as-a-Service)​
• Serverless functions (Functions-as-a-Service)​
• Global data pipelines ​
• Streaming data and message bus​ (Kafka-aaS, NATS-aaS)
• AI (Tensorflow-aaS, Openvino-aaS)
• Ingress controller and service mesh​ (nginx/traefik-aaS, Istio-aaS)
• App monitoring and alerting (Prometheus-aaS)
• Log Forwarding

As a developer, you can also securely connect to your existing data lakes in any cloud using the built-in data interfaces (AWS S3/Kinesis/SQS, Azure Blob Storage, GCP CloudStorage, etc.). This is particularly useful for the most advanced types of cloud native applications, which often span multiple clouds, at scale.

Given the expansive range of services available within the cloud native ecosystem, we built KPS to be extensible, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate whichever ones they choose. Whether you’re building simple stateful applications or architecting sophisticated microservices-based ones to run at web-scale, Karbon Platform Services is a great solution.

As an operator, you can breathe easier knowing that KPS abstracts away the infrastructure complexity they would otherwise grapple with in a legacy datacenter. With KPS, Kubernetes and containers are leveraged as services, and the simple, intuitive user experience that Nutanix has become well-known for enables streamlined management. That experience extends to multicloud Kubernetes as well.

For example, if you have an existing Kubernetes cluster (be it from Nutanix Karbon, EKS, or GKE) you can import it easily into KPS’s SaaS management in just a few basic steps. Leveraging this infrastructure service, you can manage various Kubernetes deployments and establish unified observability through the Kubernetes dashboard made available through this centralized management plane.

We know that flexibility and choice are critical when it comes to cloud native technologies, and they have significant cost implications to the organization. We built KPS to run on our customers’ cloud, or clouds, of choice. KPS is deployable on Nutanix AOS, bare metal, and on AWS, Azure, and GCP, giving you the ability to optimize for your organization’s unique cloud strategy.

There’s still lots to share about how Karbon Platform Services can fast-track your organization’s cloud native journey.

Check out the KPS product page for more information and register for a free, full-featured trial experience!

You can also access our series of self-guided deep-dive workshops available on GitHub.

r1] Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Trends in Modern Application Environments, December 2019

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