Since working at Zynga, I have been trying to build a clustered infrastructure control plane for on-prem infrastructure to simplify application development.
As I dug into understanding Prism Element and Prism Central’s architecture, it struck me that my holy grail, building an easy-to-use and configured clustered control plane, was a solved problem. Nutanix had what I was trying to build.
Why was it my holy grail?
A simple principle of software engineering is that it’s easier to write code on top of robust systems than on top of fragile systems. If the system is robust, then it’s forgiving of programming errors. A great example is performance; your code doesn’t have to be as efficient if your hardware is fast enough.
If that intuition doesn’t work, when you write code, you introduce bugs. It’s much easier to debug the new code you just wrote than debug the code you use that you may have no access to.
If that intuition doesn’t work, consider a server running many applications and then installing a new one. It’s much easier to debug the availability of the latest application if the server without the application has predictable availability.
Traditional applications that run in a single VM rely on the OS to be more reliable than their application. So, when their application crashes, they can debug it in isolation.
One of the astonishing engineering outcomes of the last twenty years was the emergence of hypervisors that are more reliable than the OS running the application.
That enabled significant consolidation, engineering efficiency, and operational efficiency.
The challenge with clustered applications is that they have no analog to the hypervisor that manages their infrastructure.
As a result, the application cluster control plane manages the application and the infrastructure.
The recent re-infatuation with bare metal is a side effect of this problem. If the virtualization layer can’t offer a clustered control plane, then the application must. And if the application can do it, why do I need the virtualization layer? Virtualization provides a container on a server. That container and the server are disposable. So why am I paying money and cost?
If your hypervisor doesn’t have a clustered control plane, you may be right.
And since I assumed Nutanix didn’t have one, I planned to build one here.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it has been in shipping for 10 years.
Part of the elegance of the Nutanix VDI solution is the Prism Element’s clustered control plane.
Using Nutanix infrastructure, you can rely on the underlying infrastructure control plane to be more reliable than the application control plane. More importantly, you can offload some of the complexity of the application control plane. Most importantly, you can share your infrastructure easily.
Welcome to the future.
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