Project Beacon

The vast majority of organizations plan to leverage two or more IT infrastructure environments – including on-premises, in public cloud or at the edge – over the next one to three years. The emergence of containers and Kubernetes® has made moving applications between these infrastructure environments relatively easy. But, the IaaS and PaaS data services that so many developers rely on to build and ship code faster are tied to specific public clouds. This leads to high switching costs when looking to move applications to a more suitable environment, 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 IaaS and PaaS-level data services that are no longer tied to a single infrastructure provider,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President & CEO at Nutanix. “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.”

With Project Beacon, Nutanix aims to deliver these critical data-centric infrastructure and platform services with a single API and console, integrated with Kubernetes® container orchestration, and consistent management across environments. The 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. As a result, developers would have access to a suite of data-centric IaaS and PaaS services whether in hyperscaler infrastructure, on-premises or at the edge. At the same time, operations teams would be able to remain in full 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 Chief Executive Officer, Red Hat. “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.”

As a key step in this journey, we are developing Cloud Native AOS, which will take our proven and resilient AOS stack and deliver it in a containerized platform. The first use case available will be Nutanix Data Services (NDK) powered by Cloud Native AOS, which brings enterprise-grade data protection and data management capabilities to cloud native apps starting with AWS EKS with a vision to expand across any hyperscaler and K8s environment.

Coming later, Nutanix Files running natively on public cloud will provide enterprise-grade file services in the public cloud. It will help customers easily and cost-effectively support hybrid cloud use cases such as disaster recovery. We also plan to deliver Nutanix Database Service™ (NDB) as a fully managed service in the public cloud, followed by additional platform data services including streaming, caching, and search.

“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, IDC RVP for Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies. “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.”

Project Beacon represents a bold, new chapter for Nutanix and we are excited to take this journey with our current and future customers. Sign up here to get updates on Project Beacon and participate in the beta process as we roll out new capabilities and services over the coming months and years.