Nutanix Project Beacon: Vision for Hybrid Multicloud PaaS

At NEXT Conference, Nutanix, Inc. announced Project Beacon, a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric 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 – including on-premises, in public cloud or at the edge – in the next 1 to 3 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 and CEO. “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, the company 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 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 CEO, Red Hat, Inc. “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.”

The company 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.

The firm would then expand from there to 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, RVP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies, IDC. “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.”