the nutaxinist 04: the magical distributed database

Everyone has a take on their company’s magical mystery sauce. For me, it’s without a doubt the distributed database that underpins Nutanix’s product’s storage, management, and control planes.

At its most reductionist core, a cloud is a distributed database with microservices that implement business logic and an IO path.

The hard problem in the cloud is building a distributed database that is transparent to the microservices’ consumers.

The problem is so complex that the public cloud providers have struggled to bring their platforms to on-prem.

The complexity is along three dimensions: the first is building such a thing, the second is getting it to work, and the third is making it work within a large number of unique customer deployments where the customer does the deployment and life cycle.

The cloud vendors solved the problem by owning the database’s deployment and lifecycle. They could control the hardware and software deployment and, by doing that, achieved astonishing scale and availability. They also have a tremendously sophisticated engineering team that can operate those systems at scale.

Nutanix, because of its origin in HCI, built a clustered database, and you can find out more about it here: nutanixbible.com

That database has then become the basis of their control and management planes.

Because of its origins, that database is—from the management software perspective—infinitely available and infinitely reliable. Its existence is transparent to the customer.

Working at Nutanix, I am struck by the fact that, unlike every other competitor in the space, our system is architected from the ground up to be a control and management plane for the cloud.

That difference delivers real business value. For example, backup and restore of the control and management plane are trivial. Recovery is plausible with a minimum of fuss. That is telling when you compare it to other enterprise-class products, especially other infrastructure products.

Because of how the system is built, you need one backup of one system to get all of the microservices’ states. Restoring is done with a single point-in-time copy, so you don’t need to restore multiple different databases.

Or consider DR and HA; there is precisely one way to do it, and it works for all services.

For systems like backup, DR, and HA, the complexity of the backup/recovery process, the HA process, or the DR process intrinsically affects the system’s availability; Nutanix has a shockingly good system.

In fact, when I joined, I was stunned by how good it was.

It’s the power of that fundamental core architectural building block that makes Nutanix a magical platform.