Few CIOs would have imagined how radically their infrastructures would change over the last 10 years — and the speed of change is only accelerating. To keep up, IT must be able to rapidly design and deliver application architectures that not only meet the business needs of the company but also meet data recovery and compliance mandates. It’s a tall order, because as technologies, business needs, and applications change, so must the environments where they are deployed.
Moving applications between data center, edge, and cloud environments is no simple task. Code dependencies tether applications to specific environments, and moving to another requires refactoring and rearchitecting, which can take weeks or months. It’s no understatement that CIOs need the capability to move workloads from one environment to another easily and without refactoring.
Containers were developed to address this need. They place the workload in a virtual box that contains the entire stack required to run it, and it’s portable from one environment to another. But not all applications will be ported to a container. Some already work well in their current environment, so there’s simply no need to make them portable.
Unfortunately, this mix of containers and virtual machines (VMs) creates management complexity, as IT typically uses different platforms to manage them. This causes IT to lose visibility into the interactions and dependencies between VMs and containers. Additionally, containers need application-level data services, which becomes increasingly difficult containers because are not static. Finally, within a distributed hybrid cloud model, efficient container and VM management demands a specialized platform: one that can automate and orchestrate processes while ensuring compliance and data sovereignty.
The open-source Kubernetes platform automates container deployment, scaling, and management, but it’s a complex environment. In too many cases, its deployment has created even more complexity in managing persistent data between VMs and containerized applications. Typically, IT must create two separate environments.
Ultimately, IT needs a Kubernetes platform that can span both hybrid and multicloud environments, supporting a microservices architecture that provides the necessary flexibility, agility, and compliance to manage containers and VMs. The Nutanix Kubernetes® Platform does exactly this, enabling admins to manage VMs and containers in a unified platform.
With Nutanix, IT can deploy production-ready, multimaster Kubernetes clusters in just a few clicks. Admins can house containers and VMs anywhere within their environment — in the cloud, bare metal, or third-party virtualization platforms — and the platform provides comprehensive platform services, including observability, cost management, fleet management, GitOps, and integration with open-source developer tools. Additionally, the platform provides persistent storage for block and file, object storage, and databases. Meanwhile, data services enable snapshots, replication, and disaster recovery for containers and VMs across all environments.
As a result, IT can ensure true application portability across a distributed infrastructure landscape and consistent operations for platform engineering teams. With a single, unified platform, IT teams can manage both VMs and containers, increase flexibility, eliminate the need to retrain staff on another platform, and easily modernize their apps.
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