The Computer Weekly Developer Network went to Kubecon + CloudNativeCon London this week and had a chance to sit down withTobi Knaup in his role as VP for and general manager for cloud-native technologies at Nutanix.
Knaup was vocal on all things Nutanix (obviously), all things cloud and cloud-native, all things Kubernetes and its role as a key driver in the growth of AI and where cloud-native and multi-cloud technologies really come into play next.
A core technologist at heart, Knaup is the former co-founder and CEO of D2iQ, the independent Kubernetes company whose technology was acquired by Nutanix in 2023. Today, the technology base from D2iQ is used by a broad array of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, for its modernisation initiatives and mission-critical apps.
Prior to D2iQ, Knaup was tech lead at Airbnb, where he built many parts of the infrastructure, including the search and AI-based fraud detection services.
Reminding us that Nutanix wasoriginally started by some former Google Engineers (the team that created Google’s storage system internally), he said that a lot of the drive behind the company has been all about making powerful enterprise multi-cloud technologies accessible and mainstream.
The rise of hyperconvergence
He talked about the rise of hyperconvergence (and HCI… hyperconverged infrastructure) – and the key role that Nutanix has undeniably had in that the company added its own hypervisor to the platform – and the drive to make sure customers could work with data running virtual machines in their most productive state.
“Nutanix has been doing a lot more with cloud-native and containers now going all the way back to 2013, so now we have a single platform for customers to run VMs and containers on a single storage substrate,” said Knaup. “Today, we really focus on giving people a complete and open Kubernetes platform that runs on any infrastructure – integrated with about 30 or so other open source projects – and that’s all integrated in a single solution covering everything from networking to observability to access control and beyond… it’s all drawn from the CNCF ecosystem, and it’s all modular.”
Knaup says the company is making it easy for customers to stand up a full Kubernetes on any infrastructure – so that can be a virtualized infrastructure, it can be bare metal infrastructure… it could be on a private or public cloud and it could be on the edge.
“This is because large organisations in particular (increasingly) are running so many many different Kubernetes environments and having to do that on that mix of infrastructures, so we need to bring standardisation and control to bear for these users,” said Knaup. “We also have super advanced Kubernetes fleet management capabilities now so that customers can manage all of those different environments with a single operating model and they don’t have to build individually managed environments, which creates a lot of issues.”
Talking about Nutanix customers, including Royal Caribbean (the cruise line), the company runs a sort of a mini Kubernetes datacentre on the Nutanix platform on each ship. Because they need to remotely manage those environments over a satellite link, they see the value in picking a single platform that can run with freedom and with lots of add-ons.
Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP)
Asked what really makes (in his view) Nutanix special these days, Knaup has said that the company’s Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution is special due to its complete and open nature, which is ready to go to production as soon as customers need it and is also customisable via open source openness… so users can build applications on top of it.
“Before NKP, third-party tools (which are often a chaotic mashup of open source) were a recurring nightmare for IT administrators and security teams,” noted Knaup and team. “In most cases, this nightmare is a result of application modernisation efforts spread across several teams that do not coordinate with each other. IT administrators and security teams were stuck with endless tracking and potential contention with anyone responsible for application development.”
He suggests that Nutanix NKP helps to quell the contention and frenzy that invariably hampers the success of these teams by validating interoperability and support to help achieve greater business value from any modern application delivery initiative and keeping track of all the essential utilities that most developers use.
Platform engineers and IT admins can use NKP to keep all cloud-native resources up-to-date with upgrades, patching, maintenance and security.
“What really enables Nutanix to deliver these days is our ability to give customers a single operating model for Kubernetes, wherever they may be running it,” said Knaup. “They don’t have to do it one way on the cloud and do it a different way on-prem and this really cuts down the number of scripts they have to write and the number of automations they have to build.”
Double up: VMs & containers
But that’s just talking about the Kubernetes platform, what Knaup thinks is interesting is that virtual machines have become a bigger topic at Kubecon, so he thinks every infrastructure leader is now thinking how they will (over the next 10 years or so) be able to run a mix of VMs and containers
“I think what Nutanix has to offer is pretty unique, because we have a platform that can now mature as a virtualization platform and act as a single data substrate underpinning an enterprise’s technology stack, so a multiple combination of our products is really a big differentiator – and if you add in Nutanix Enterprise AI as a complete AI platform that runs on top of Kubernetes, we’re really bringing AI compute to wherever customers have their data that they want to run models,” said Knaup. “We’re having great conversations with every one of our customers as they’re trying to figure out how to best take advantage of AI and our capability lies in enabling customers to bring AI to their data, instead of them having to bring their data to a public AI… and that’s really important because we work with a lot of customers that are regulated Industries (defence and medicine for example) and they cannot use public AI endpoints.@
Key takeaway thoughts
In terms of things to think about on the road ahead, Knaup says that he thinks most organisations are probably looking at two continuums i.e. one VM estate and one container estate. Being able to have the resources available for both in one place will be key.
“The other dimension that I think everybody’s thinking about is ‘all right, how do I manage my Kubernetes across all the different environments that I have on cloud and off cloud (or edge) environments… and how will AI adoption impact that?’ Having a single operating model for Kubernetes on all of these different infrastructures is just something that is really really valuable,” he concluded.
There is clearly a big Kubernetes message coming out of Nutanix right now; the way to think about the company’s stance with the CNCF and Kubecon cognoscenti is that Nutanix supports (and in some places contributes to) the open cloud community, but its offering is an essentially enterprise-grade supported and maintainer offering for organisations who want to work with the technologies that exist in this space.