Nutanix has announced Karbon Platform Services, a Kubernetes-based multicloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with
automated system-managed security, to accelerate the development and deployment of microservices-based apps across any
cloud. This offering provides software developers with a turnkey managed services experience, on-premises, in the public
cloud, and at the edge, to build and run cloud native applications while enabling them to decouple applications from the
underlying infrastructure. It also provides IT operations teams with a simplified and consistent application lifecycle
management and security framework. This announcement marks a significant milestone for Nutanix as it looks to expand
offerings aimed at accelerating enterprises’ cloud native journeys.
Enterprises, with their sights set on realising the benefits of digital initiatives, often struggle to unleash the full
potential of their software developers and the agile DevOps processes by which they need to operate. Kubernetes, along
with its ecosystem of cloud native technologies, continues to rapidly evolve, making it increasingly difficult to
implement without extensive technical resources. Furthermore, organisations need to be able to leverage both on-premises
and public cloud-based Kubernetes deployments without compromising their ability to manage data, applications, and IT
resources simply and effectively.
“IT resources are the engines that power digital enterprises. But as a company scales, adopts hybrid cloud, and manages
an increasing number of applications, supporting engineering needs can be challenging for IT,” said Rajiv Mirani, CTO at
Nutanix. “With Karbon Platform Services, we aim to simplify application development and orchestration while streamlining
the relationship between IT and development teams to support our customers’ DevOps strategies.”
This new cloud native PaaS will help software engineers to streamline application development and orchestration without
needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. Karbon Platform Services builds on the core Kubernetes lifecycle
management capabilities initially introduced with Karbon as an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software. This
new offering brings automated, system-managed security and multi-tenancy to run a wide range of microservices-based
applications across multiple cloud infrastructures.
“We were looking for a single PaaS platform that could host our Reflex and Vision Insights on both the edge and in our
private cloud, to take advantage of both a distributed architecture as well as support software development and machine
training on the public cloud,” said Damien Pasquinelli, CTO at Hardis Group. “Karbon Platform Services delivers the
richness of services we need in a PaaS solution, along with the simplicity and ease of management Nutanix is known for —
across clouds. Implementing Karbon Platform Services has allowed our Vision Insights development and DevOps teams to go
from zero to prototype in less than a quarter of the time it previously took. This software running on Karbon Platform
Services is already in production for customers like Schneider Electric, a leading global specialist in energy
management and automation."
Key benefits of Karbon Platform Services include:Rich Managed Services: This PaaS offering enables rapid development and deployment of applications ranging from simple stateful containerised
applications to complex web-scale applications by leveraging simple, open abstraction of rich services. Specifically,
Karbon Platform Services include: managed Kubernetes (K8s-aaS), Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS), serverless Functions,
AI, message bus, ingress, service mesh, observability, and security services.SaaS-based Multicloud Operations: Ops teams benefit from simplified operations and uniform application, data, and security lifecycle management,
regardless of the underlying cloud, at scale leveraging the SaaS-based infrastructure lifecycle manager. Developers
benefit from the rich platform services to write applications once and deploy in the cloud through the SaaS-based
application lifecycle manager.Extensible Hybrid PaaS: Karbon Platform Services provides cross-cloud data mobility and hybrid application management through transparent,
WAN-optimised data pipelines and extensible data interfaces. This feature gives enterprises the flexibility to bring
their own services and leverage the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.Enhanced Security Posture: With Karbon Platform Services, IT operations teams can leverage a consistent security and API model with unified
observability for data and applications across cloud. It provides automated, system-managed security with built-in
multi-tenancy and role-based access control (RBAC) for the rich services.
“The complexities of Kubernetes and multicloud infrastructure management can not only overwhelm IT operations teams, but
also limit the resources and tooling available to modern application software developers . With Karbon Platform
Services, Nutanix abstracts infrastructure complexity and delivers a managed Kubernetes, containers, and a host of
essential developer services in an easy, readily-consumable PaaS environment,” said Bob Laliberte, Practice Director & Senior Analyst at ESG Research. “And given that 70% of customers we’ve recently surveyed1 prefer the combination of
public cloud and private datacentre for containerised applications, Karbon Platform Services satisfies that desire for
flexibility with its global control plane and simple multicloud management capabilities.”
Nutanix Karbon Platform Services is now available to customers. For more information, visit here.
In addition to Karbon Platform Services, Nutanix has also announced Xi Calm, a hosted version of its application management and orchestration solution to support DevOps teams, which is under
development.