Nutanix announced Project Beacon, a
multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform as a
Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere - including on
Nutanix or on native public cloud. 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.
According to the Enterprise Cloud Index,
75% of IT teams expect to leverage more than one IT infrastructure 一
including on-premises, in public cloud or at the edge 一 in the next one
to three years. Moving applications to a different environment is
currently possible at the infrastructure layer. However, the PaaS
services that many organizations use to help developers build and ship
applications faster cause lock-in as they are tied to specific public
clouds. This leads to high switching costs when looking to move
applications to an environment that is more suitable, 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."
As part of Project Beacon, Nutanix aims to deliver the platform
services that many organizations rely on, with a single API and console,
integrated with Kubernetes container orchestration, and consistent
management across environments. This suite of data-centric platform
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. Through these services, developers would have access
to a suite of data-centric PaaS services whether in native public cloud,
on-premises or at the edge, while 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 customer
benefits of the Nutanix Database Service (NDB) solution as a managed
service in the public cloud. This will build on the NDB database
automation and management experience already available on Nutanix Cloud
Infrastructure (NCI), as a managed service on native public cloud
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 so that developers would not have to rely on solutions that
will 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."
More information on Project Beacon is available here.