Kathy Gibson reports from Nutanix .Next in Washington DC – In a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, organisations shouldn’t be constrained as to what cloud they can use to run their workloads.
Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO of Nutanix, points out that his company has been working with the public cloud providers for some years now, first partnering with AWS in 2020 and Azure in 2022.
“And this year we are announcing Nutanix availability on Google Cloud, with general availability later in 2025,” he announced today to 5 000 Nutanix .Next delegates in Washington DC.
At the same time, Ramaswami introduced Cloud Native AOS (Acropolis Operating System), which extends Nutanix enterprise storage and advanced data services to hyperscaler Kubernetes services and cloud-native bare-metal environments – without requiring a hypervisor.
Nutanix AOS, the core software stack for the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure platform, has always been at the heart of Nutanix’s key philosophy of being able to build and run apps anywhere.
“In the modern environment, virtual machines (VMs) and containers are complementary – it is not one or the other,” he says. “Customers have long used VMs to make infrastructure management better, to get higher utilisation, to simplify operations, and provide great resilience.
“Containers, meanwhile, offer greater agility, faster development, and open source leverage,” Ramaswami adds.
“In most cases, we believe the best solution is to run containers on VMs to get the best of both worlds. But customers might also want to run containers on bare metal – for instance, for modern applications like AI or specific high-performance workloads that will consume the entire underlying infrastructure.”
Lee Caswell, senior vice-president: product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, says AOS can now run on any hypervisor or on bare metal, allowing customers to derisk their infrastructure by reducing their reliance on any particular vendor.
As data becomes more distributed, users are looking for a consistent way to protect, replicate, and restore data across Kubernetes infrastructure in data centres, bare metal edge locations, and cloud-native hyperscalers. What’s been missing is a common data platform that can run across bare-metal, virtualised, and containerised infrastructure.
Cloud Native AOS completes this puzzle with storage and data services that can run directly on cloud-native infrastructure anywhere – in the cloud or on bare metal. By eliminating the need for a hypervisor, this new solution allows users to consolidate storage management across the distributed hybrid cloud.
This new solution simplifies day two intelligent operations for Kubernetes applications and their data – anywhere. Cloud Native AOS extends Nutanix’s proven and resilient AOS software – the backbone of its platform for data, Platform-as-a-Service, and AI – to stateful, native Kubernetes clusters in the cloud and bare-metal environments.
“Nutanix has built a complete platform for enterprise-grade infrastructure with advanced data services in virtualised data centres,” says Thomas Cornely, senior vice-president: product management at Nutanix. “Now we are extending the reach of our platform to users of cloud-native infrastructure on Kubernetes service in public clouds and on bare metal, delivering enterprise resiliency, day 2 operations, and security.”
Key benefits include:
- Ready-to-Use Resilience for Any Application – Cloud Native AOS provides resilience for Kubernetes infrastructure by protecting containerised applications and their data with integrated disaster recovery between availability zones, clouds, and on-premises.
- Cloud-Native Mobility – Customers can build and deploy cloud-native applications with seamless migration of applications and data optimally located across sites, including the ability to move applications back to on-premises containerised environments.
- Integrated Data Management – The solution empowers developers to use Kubernetes APIs to automate and provide self-service control over all aspects of data management for their applications.
“Enterprises are increasingly adopting Kubernetes for application orchestration and are challenged with integrating these cloud-native applications into existing workflows while meeting business SLAs,” says Dave Pearson, infrastructure research vice-president at IDC. “Cloud Native AOS helps to close this gap by bringing data mobility and disaster recovery to the data persistence layer of cloud-native applications and delivering a new deployment model for the AOS storage system.”
Project Beacon
Cloud Native AOS is the latest product to come out of Nutanix’s Project Beacon. It is currently in early access on Amazon EKS, and will be generally available within the next few months. Early access for on-premises containerised environments on bare-metal servers is expected to be available by the end of this calendar year.
Project Beacon aims to provide customers with all the tools they need to be able to build once, run anywhere, says Ramaswami.
He says Nutanix is including AI data service, platform service, and elements of the AI stack to pull it all together.
“We are bringing all these elements into a modern application platform, and making significant investments to make it a reality.”
The first part of the solution was the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, which is open and complete, simple and secure, available on-premise and in the cloud.
The next step is today’s announcement of a completely cloud-native version of AOS. “This brings the benefits of AOS to native cloud applications, giving customers resilience, portability, and hybrid cloud disaster recovery,” Ramaswami explains.
“And it is as easy to use as the on-premises solution – because it is essentially the same product.”
Later this year, AOS will also become available on bare metal Linux.
“By bringing this all together, Nutanix lets you manage across VMs and containers; offering one experience with data, PaaS and management – and you can run it anywhere,” Ramaswami concludes.
“Every year we are bringing more capabilities to Project Beacon.”
More cloud-native support
Today, Nutanix made a number of additional announcements to support its cloud-native infrastructure including the introduction of NC2 on Google Cloud, and NC2 updates for AWS and Azure.
“These announcements mean we are completing the hyperscaler story,” says Caswell.
A new partnership with Canonical offers customers a hardened Linux that can be used for bare metal installations at the edge, furthering extending the opportunity for Nutanix customers and partners.