I joined Nutanix because of great people, inspiring leadership, a solid business model, innovative technology, and a lovely 15-minute commute.
In my early days here, I was a bit puzzled about how we managed to thrive, especially considering the significant energy I had previously devoted to trying to put Nutanix out of business.
Everything changed when I had the chance to meet the CTO Ambassadors. During a conversation, Joe Garvey shared his insights about how Nutanix customers often restored from backup too quickly instead of tackling the challenges they faced with Prism Central.
I was genuinely taken aback.
It was amusing because, from my viewpoint, the ability to restore from backup felt remarkable. The Nutanix team seemed a bit puzzled, unsure why “restoring” from backup was such a significant consideration.
This experience launched me on a fascinating journey of discovery, revealing just how incredibly special Nutanix truly is.
Their management and control plane is a cloud-native application, easily packaged and installed by customers on-premises.
And I have talked about this before (the nutanixist 05 – Nutanix is the RDS of your enterprise. and the nutanixist 08: Is it simple because it’s simple, or because it’s always engineered to be simple? A parable about ARM and Nutanix, or why Paul Graham is right. and the nutaxinist 04: the magical distributed database)
So, what truly defines something as cloud-native? The essential components include scalability, seamless upgrades, no single points of failure, the use of microservices, and an API-centric architecture. Prism Central beautifully incorporates all of these features.
As I delved into the system, I uncovered a very contemporary application architecture that, in some aspects, seemed ahead of its time compared to the Kubernetes platform design. However, the challenge we faced was that the industry ecosystem had evolved alongside Nutanix, making it practical to shift to the standard platform to optimize our investments in the broader ecosystem.
As a result, we recognized the need to replatform our products. In our case, replatforming was a monumental effort, but it wasn’t about rewriting everything. From a business logic perspective, it ended up being mostly transparent.
So, what benefits do we gain?
Today, Prism Central stands as a single-scale-out cloud-native application that can scale to three VMs. With the introduction of the new disaggregated platform, we successfully migrated some Prism Central services to their own Kubernetes cluster, allowing us to scale these services independently.
Just like with Prism Central, our customers don’t need to be platform administrators; we utilize Kubernetes to keep the platform experience seamless and transparent.
What’s even more remarkable is that we didn’t need to entirely shift to Kubernetes to harness all of that value.
It’s truly impressive to think that Nutanix managed to evolve from a modern yet somewhat outdated platform to a newer one in just two years. This transformation speaks volumes about the product architecture and its alignment with future advancements, rather than working against them.
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